The present invention provides a means by which the reliability of communication between any RFID reader and tag in an RFID system is improved by using an “interleaved parity” algorithm. The improved reliability is obtained by computing, on one RFID device, an interleaved parity code for a message, sending the message with the code from the RFID device, receiving the message on the other RFID device which computes another interleaved parity code for the received message. The two parity codes are compared and if the codes are the same, the message can be parsed and interpreted. If the codes indicate that one bit of the message is incorrect, the incorrect bit is corrected and the message is parsed and interpreted. Otherwise, a request for a new message is sent to the RFID device, and, if appropriate, an indication of two erroneous bits is also sent.