"Other people's children and spouses" showed up in eGov: where data errors come from

The head of NIT explained where eGov's odd errors come from — cases where "other people's" children or spouses appear in a citizen's profile. The causes are prosaic: decades of manual entry across agency systems, database migrations, duplicates and mismatches when merging sources. An error once typed by an operator is merely made visible by the digital storefront.

The story mirrors any company that has accumulated data for years. Duplicate clients live in the CRM, counterparties with different spellings in the accounting system, stale prices in spreadsheets. While the data lies as dead weight the errors are invisible; the moment reports and AI start relying on it, each one surfaces at the least convenient time.

The practical takeaway for business in Kazakhstan: treat data quality as a process, not a one-time cleanup before a rollout. Entry rules, an owner for reference books and regular automatic checks for duplicates and mismatches — exactly the routine worth handing to algorithms: in 1Cifer, agents catch anomalies in company data automatically instead of waiting for a customer to trip over the mistake. Clean data is not aesthetics; it is the foundation of every decision made on top of it.