In organisations that have many interconnected departments, it can be easy for a problem to get passed between divisions without ever being formally reported. This is especially true of data quality issues, which create their own brand of confusion and often go unnoticed by leaders in the company.

As Dylan Jones writes in a post for the Data Roundtable, the higher-ups and team managers are not actively involved in list management or other data quality projects, not because they don't care, but because they often do not understand the impact it has on their division.

"Just because your company doesn’t give you data quality reports every month doesn’t mean there are no data quality issues to be found," Jones says, adding that there will certainly be at least a few problems.

He explains that if a leader does not know how much time his or her staff members are spending on "non-value activities" rooted in poor-quality information, or how much more productive they would be if they didn't have to deal with the issue, there is a DQ problem.

To overcome this situation, you will need to start changing the culture -- turning it into one that values accuracy and reliability -- and adopt address validation software or another solution to clean up the data.