Much has been written about the monetary impacts of poor data quality. A familiar and easy to understand illustration of this is the cost of bad postal address data: The US Postal Service (USPS) estimated in 2013 that there were approximately 6.8 billion pieces of mail that could not be delivered as addressed. Beyond the fact that the USPS itself spent $1.5 billion to process that mail (e.g., forwarding it, returning it, disposing of it, etc.), that’s only a fraction of the wasted costs of postage and collateral from the businesses that sent the mail in the first place. Even assuming an unrealistically low average cost of $0.50 per mailing, we’re talking about a wasted $3.4 billion per year due to incorrect address data.

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