This white paper examines a significant problem facing the security industry - false alarms - including the costs and potential solutions. It also analyzes the impact of the new Alarm Validation Standard introduced by The Monitoring Association (TMA-AVS-01). The paper highlights the impact of false alarms on public safety, with emergency responders often diverted from genuine security events to respond to false alarms, and the provisions in the TMA-AVS-01 designed to reduce false alarms while still ensuring proper responses for actual emergencies.