How to cheat at everything and influence people

In Finland, the art of imposture has gotten a lot of attention after a young man with no qualifications was caught working as a doctor. The young man was hired by two employers, neither of which had checked his background. He had convinced his employers by showing forged diplomas. After the incident, several other cases were revealed where unqualified persons had been hired to work in the Finnish health care sector.

The mentioned man´s reason for pretending to be a doctor was money, and the reward was high enough for him to justify the means.
The imposter’s monthly salary was over 4,000 Euros. This was enough for the young man to risk the health and life of his patients. According to the Finnish media, authorities have now checked the patient records of hundreds of people related to this case.

Meanwhile, a Swedish man was convicted in the Dutch court after being caught in the cockpit of a passenger plane. He had flown passenger planes with several airlines for 13 years with no qualifications. He had learned to fly by using a passenger plane simulator while working as an airline mechanic. Again, the key to his success was forging diplomas that nobody cared to check.

Authorities work hard to prevent cases like this. There are databases, where it is possible to run background checks for qualifications. However, the main problem has to do with a mixture of haste, lack of effort and the compromised usability of these services. In this case the impostor was caught because of his mistakes. Despite getting caught, he applied and was accepted to work in another hospital in Finland. He was hired, even though the National Supervisory Authority for Welfare and Health had already caught him. If only the employers had checked his background, he would have been caught already at the applicant stage.

Preventing cases like this should be handled in two ways. On one hand, the relevant data about a person´s work roles and positions should be aggregated to safe and convenient places, such as online portals. On the other hand, every single person hired to work in a responsible position should be identified in a more secure way than is possible with the current methods. Health care and aviation authorities are likely to be considering the options, but the new methods for accessing confidential information should actually be used throughout the society.

When considering the potential for improved and mobile identity services, identity thefts, scams and cons play a relatively small role. The real benefits of Mobile ID come from diminishing the daily grind, such as getting rid of excess amounts of individual identity cards e.g. for loyal customers.

If we take a look at an ordinary wallet, we are likely to find customer loyalty cards, which identify customers to merchants. Debit and credit cards identify customers to the payment systems of banks and credit card companies. We might also find some copy cards, library cards and a driving license. Imagine that one identity service could replace all this by sharing the relevant information with all parties. The wallet could thus be saved for truly important items, like cash and photos of your loved ones.

There’s No Such Thing as Free Bureaucracy

The goal of ideal bureaucracy is a more rational and efficient organization, said the German sociologist Max Weber nearly one hundred years ago. I would like to add my two cents with a few suggestions.

Bureaucracy is mostly seen as an endless task of filling different forms, to be given to authorities, to be moved back and forth between them. The goal of the play is to prove various self-evident facts to different authorities.

In the coming years, many people will retire from administrative tasks in the public sector. Their positions will be filled in with fewer people. Using a worn-out phrase: to John Smith, this is both a threat and an opportunity.

The Worst-case-scenario: the world will be run as rigidly as ever, but with fewer people. The second worst-case-scenario: the web will be flooded with various forms to be filled in with a computer and then printed on paper and sent to authorities by snail mail. In my opinion, in an almost perfect world we could use governmental services as self-services whenever possible.

To John Smith, self-services mean easier living, as the public services can be accessed anywhere and anytime. There have been ambitious talks about a single public services portal in Finland, but it would be enough to have the services online in the first place. The browser window is a one-stop-shop: I am willing and able to move between different portals on the Internet. However, these portals should provide true e-service; I don´t want to print out papers of three different authorities from a portal just to fill them in and then return them back by snail mail.

The currently lacking transparency in public services could be easily increased with tracking codes. If I had a pending case in public administration, I could check the status of the case on the web with a mobile ID. I could see what has happened so far, what will happen next, who is working on the case at the moment and who I can contact if there seems to be a delay. I would also see who has access to my files and why.

I certainly don´t want to dispose of in-person customer service in the public sector. In complicated matters, the personal touch and face-time are needed. E-services could help to achieve just that; by replacing administrative routines with self-services, civil servants could be liberated to work on these more meaningful and relevant tasks.

The self-service concept of public services has been at the planning stage for years. One of the roadblocks has been the lack of common, secure and cost-efficient authentication. Another obstacle has been and still is the moving of public sector services online. The latter will surely take time and a lot of understanding and co-operation.