Death Audit Pros is an IT consulting company that provides consulting services to Pension Funds (Public, Corporate & Multi-Employer), state, and local government agencies, Third Party Administrators (TPA) insurance, reverse mortgage companies, and banks and other financial services of all sizes that need to set up their Death Audit Services in-house. 

In June, the world became very aware of the MOVEit data breach.

It has evolved (as of August/2023) to more than 600 organizations worldwide, and over 40 million people have been affected by the cyber hack of Progress' MOVEit Transfer file management program.

In the area of Death Audit Services and Solutions, pension management organizations such as the California Public Employees' Retirement System and T. Rowe Price Corebridge Financial, Genworth Financial, Putnam Investments, Fidelity, Teachers Retirement System of Georgia, Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America and others breached via Pension Benefit Information.

Your organization still has to check and monitor its roles for deaths to save monies or maintain its participant's roles as defined by the Department of Labor requirements for missing participants. 

What do you do? 

The most secure method is to bring the death audit services and solutions in-house. Put it under your security and never send out all of your participant's PII data in a batch again. 

Death Audit Pros will help you set up and maintain your Death Audit Services and Solutions. The services and solutions can be extended to Missing Participant requirements.  Add an answer to this item.

 Death Audit Pros offers IT consulting services to help you set up your in-house Death Audit Services. We will work with you to gather, subscribe and secure death data information behind your firewall, security, data governance, and security policies. 

We can also provide subscription software to compare participants and the death data to find deaths within your ranks. The subscription software runs on your systems within your security framework. We can customize the software for your reporting, grading and export needs. 

With the software located at your company, you can run it anytime.

You no longer have to send your participant's data to insecure third-party, uncertified vendors. 

We work closely with you to understand your specific needs and develop customized solutions to help you achieve your goals.

The cost of Death Audit Pros' services varies depending on each client's specific needs. We offer flexible pricing plans tailored to your business's unique requirements. Contact us today to learn more about our pricing and get a customized quote.

Death Data!

We will work with you to help you subscribe to the various death audit data.  

Your Data!

We will work with you to analyze, report on (Demographics analysis), and clean your data.

1. Obituaries for Indications of Death (IOD).
2. State Data (those that are open) and the Limited Death Master File (LDMF) for official Notifications of Death (NOD).
3. If you wish, there are other third-party data providers such as (Lexus Nexus, Trans Union, and IDI Data). However, you will have to send data to them.

Don't worry; Death Audit Pros has a secure data methodology to work with third-party vendors to send only secure data out and receive encrypted, masked data back. We recommend if the third-party vendors can't adjust to the secure data methodology, don't use them.

 We call the subscription software Missing Participant System (MPS).

The MPS concentrates on Death Audit comparisons and matches. 

Since you house the data, we provide name and data lookups, result reports (death matches), Participant reports (Who is the system), data quality reports (how good is your data), and demographic reports (Age, Sex, Location).

We can customize the infamous death match grade to something that makes sense to you.  

If needed, the MPS can expand to Beneficiary searches, Address searches, data correction, etc. The services you may have used with those unsecured and uncertified third-party providers can be opened in the MPS. 

It all depends on the data that you subscribe to. 

The current Death Audit Model is broken, defective, and out of date.

It is old and was designed with little thought of security. 

Security was a secondary thought. Layers of afterthought applied without much thought to the core vulnerabilities. 

Sadly, as the 'Bad Guys' kept increasing their methods and becoming more sophisticated, the Death Audit Providers and their choice of tools could not keep up.  

The best and most secure way to protect your data is to keep it in your company, managed by your people, and secured with your internal security measures and firewalls. 

Call Death Audit Model 3.0

 Lack of attention to detail. 

As you know, the current Death Audit Model died on June 6, 2023. 

Patching the software vulnerability and 'adding additional security measures' is too little too late. 

1. Why did PBI use a known vulnerable piece of software? 

2. The additional security measures added after the fact:  What was it, and why wait until after the disaster? 

3. PBI and other death audit providers claim "Data is encrypted at rest." If the data was encrypted, then the bad guys get nothing. 

4. The forward-facing SaaS applications do not follow OWASP security guidelines. 

5. Participant data is exposed to too many internal people.

The clients/customers are not without blame. If the third-party providers have a security certificate, they have a security policy. The security policy lays out scheduled tasks and events. 

Customers need to: 

1. See, review, and keep up with the third-party internal audits, logs, known issues, and internal test results for security training and test and drug test results. 
2. Organize with other customers (User Groups) to compare notes on service and results. 
3. Get a list of all infrastructure and third-party tools and services utilized.
4. Perform an unannounced on-site visit; the office, the servers, and their partners.

Remember that good ole adage, trust but verify. It is your data. 

Click on the link to see a model of the current death audit model. 

The items in RED are weak and have dangerous security vulnerabilities. 

1. Software as a Service (SaaS). Your data is exposed to the internet. Anybody with your login has access to your data. There are all sorts of vulnerabilities here. See OWASP List. 

2. SFTP Services. We all know about this one. The  SFTP service selected and not monitored for vulnerabilities FAILED. If your data had been encrypted, you might have been safe. See TimeLine

3. Customer Data is Mixed: All customer data is piled into one central database. Customers have unique IDs, but depending on how reports are pulled, some other companies may accidentally see your data. Separate database services, one database, or separate tables for each unique customer are more secure.

4. PBI has the unique twist of allowing 'associates' to view your data to confirm it. Your data should be in a closed system—machine to machine. Only you, the actual data owner, should be able to see it. Your data must follow the Data Governance Framework.  

5. Did you know your data is sent to other Data Providers? Did you give permission? Is the data masked or encrypted when it is sent out? 

These are the significant breakpoints. Others are

1. Security policy weakness. 
2. Lack of an effective security officer. 
3. No customer on-site or virtual on-site audit. Trust but verify. 
4. Other software used by the vendor is on the CVE List. Ask your provider for a COMPLETE list of software and hardware used so that you can verify. 

Obits are the first line of information for deaths—the Indication of Death.

Obituaries are the first indication of death because they are published before State Data and the Death Master File. So, they are essential when used for Death Audits. Caveat: Only some people have an obituary, but obits are becoming increasingly common due to sales, marketing, and social media.

Currently, there are only two raw, record-based obituaries suppliers: Legacy and PBI.  

When you see the claim that these remaining death audit services have 29,000 sources. Those numbers come from the number of funeral homes, the papers with obituaries reporting deaths, and the obituary websites. Some even report having out-of-the-USA sources; Australian, New Zeeland, and some Canadian.

Traditionally, you would have to subscribe to these suppliers. But the monopoly allowed them to keep raising prices.

There is an alternative source I have been experimenting with:

· AI-powered chatbot searches

· Internet search and screen scraping

AI-powered chatbot searches. 

They are only sometimes reliable. There are still quite a few "Hallucinations." It will create an obit if it can't find one. 

The better alternative is Internet search and screen scraping. 

It is possible to use a screen scraper as an alternative. Experimenting with a search engine results from API - "Zenserp." (There are others). The cost varies on the number of searches done per month. 

A data set of 100,000 would be about $600.00 a month. 

See the example below. Data is masked for respect and privacy.

The API will bring forth all data points, funeral homes, Newspapers, and obituary services if available.

1.   A program would have to be developed to gather your in-house data and send your data out—the Call. 

2.   The results come back in JSON format. The results would have to be interpreted. This is the fuzzy part. Not all the "Descriptions" are the same.

3.   Notice the description of each result. 

4.   But you would have the link to the funeral home, website, and or newspaper with additional information for your records if one exists.

5.   The search pattern (API calls out) could be based on the Death Demographics for better efficiency. 

• Age Groups (Search for the oldest age groups      first) 
• Gender (Males tend to die first) 
• Current residence location (Some ZIP code has a higher      death rate) 
• Repeat weekly.

6.   Monitor your "ex-pats" If necessary, you can set the parameters (A separate search) to look for individuals by country code. 

• This is now an affordable model for small pension      funds, unions, and offices that need Death Audit Services.
• The smaller your data set (Participants), the smaller      the cost.
• Yes, you would not have access to the Notification      of Death (States and Death Master File); however, you will have a      viable Indication of Death before the states and the feds.  
• According to one service's findings, they found 65% of      deaths using obituaries.

If you want to build your own in-house Death Audit service and solution, contact DeathAuditPros.

(All personal information is masked.) 

· Ms. Xxxx X Xxxxxxx, DOB: 7-16-NNNN, DOD: 08/01/NNNN, was born in Columbus, Ohio, and Passed away in Cape Coral, Florida.

· The Obits found are in; The Columbus Dispatch, the funeral home, and an obit website.

· The links can provide extra information that you may need, such as possible beneficiaries.

Results from Bing: 

{

 "query": {

   "q": "Xxxx X Xxxxxxx, DOB: 7-16-NNNN",

   "search_engine": "bing.com,"

   "token": "03ADUVZwDROGNPMbAYr…………. ",

   "URL": http://www.bing.com/search?q=xxxxx+x+xxxxx%2C+DOB%3A+7-16-NNNN

 },

 "navigation_tabs": [],

 "organic": [

   {

    "link": https://www.maederquinttiberi.com/obituary/xxxxx-xxxxx,

    "display_link": https://www.maederquinttiberi.com/obituary/xxxxx-xxxxxxt,

    "title": "Obituary | Xxxx X Xxxxxxx | Maeder-Quint-Tiberi Funeral Home",

    "description": "Web Aug 1, NNNN · 1068 S High St Columbus, OH 43206 Directions Mass Saint Leo Church Thursday, August 10, NNNN 10:00 AM Email Details 221 Hanford St Columbus, OH 43206 …",

    "rank": 1,

    "global_rank": 1

   },

   {

    "link": https://www.dispatch.com/obituaries/pwoo0540283,

    "display_link": https://www.dispatch.com/obituaries/pwoo0540283,

    "title": "Xxxxx X. Xxxxxxx Obituary - The Columbus Dispatch,"

    "description": "Web21 hours ago · Xxxxx X. Xxxxxxx, born July 16, NNNN, in Columbus, Ohio - died August 1, NNNN in Cape Coral, Florida. She is preceded in death by her parents XXXX (Xxxx) and …",

    "rank": 2,

    "global_rank": 2

   },

   {

    "link": https://www.echovita.com/us/obituaries/fl/cape-coral/Xxxxxx-X-Xxxxxx-16745204,

    "display_link": https://www.echovita.com/us/obituaries/fl/cape-coral/Xxxxxx-X-Xxxxxx...,

    "title": "Xxxx X Xxxxxxx Obituary (NNNN - NNNN ) | Cape Coral, Florida,"

    "description": "Web2 Events July 16, NNNN - August 1, NNNN (NN years old) Cape Coral, Florida Send Flowers Share your support Light a candle Illuminate their memory Xxxx X Xxxxxxx Obituary We …",

    "rank": 3,

    "global_rank": 3

   }

Let us know. 

Contact us with your questions.