Trust the government with your identity and you just might lose it. Even if the identity thief is already in prison.
In Los Angeles, Calif., a county employee’s laptop was stolen while it contained the personal information including Social Security numbers for 28 individuals who were enrolled in a local government employment program. That’s the smallest breach I’ve heard reported, ever. But small ones are much rarer than large ones, it seems, and even so, for those 28 people, they’re a living nightmare.
A hacker broke into Ohio State University computers and stole personal information including Social Security numbers for 14,000 current and former faculty and staff members. In addition, a professor had stolen from his home two laptops containing personal information for 3,500 current and former chemistry students. At his home. His excuse was that he was transferring data from an old laptop to a new one.
Also in Los Angeles, a former Social Security Administration worker pleaded not guilty to charging $20 each to give out other people’s names and Social Security numbers to identity thieves, who then obtained credit and ran up millions of dollars in fraudulent charges. Her alleged co-conspirator has already pleaded guilty and will be sentenced in July. That’s right, you can’t even trust them.
And the last government agency you want to have personal information about you is the Internal Revenue Service. Aside from using your information against you to extort taxes, they’re fairly good at losing it, having had lost or stolen hundreds of laptops with your most sensitive and private financial information on it over the past few years, and having improperly secured wireless access points where malicious people could connect and gain access to internal IRS computers. You can be sure they won’t compensate you for whatever financial damage they cause. After all, it’s their job to damage you financially.
And if you aren’t convinced yet that allowing the government to have your personal information is a bad idea, consider that they’re so incompetent that they can’t even prevent criminals from running an identity theft ring from in prison. Back in Los Angeles, Morocco Curry, already in state prison for identity theft, is alledged to have continued to run his operation with three co-conspirators on the outside. They now face federal charges of identity theft, and in a couple of years, we’ll probably hear about them continuing to run their operation from federal prison.
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Verbos
Apr 19, 2007
“After all, it’s their job to damage you financially.”
This is the very truth! Corporate tax amounts to the majority of taxes collected by the Federal Government. It is constitutionally unchallengeable. Personal Tax is illegal for American citizens with a few exceptions. If personal tax were abolished, Corporate tax would be only slightly increased to cover the difference. Corporations pay tax at a much lower rate than individuals because of their blanket of loop holes anyhow. So, what other reason could there be?
John
Apr 19, 2007
Corporate taxes are not actully paid by corporations, they are collected by them. If corporate taxes are raised, the corporations collects them by passing them on to people. Methods are raising prices (consumer pays the tax), cutting employee benefits (employee pays the tax), outsourcing labor or supplies (employee or supplier pays the tax), or paying them out of profits (shareholder pays the tax).
Michael Hampton
Apr 19, 2007
Regardless of what or how you tax, you have destroyed something. Someone pays the tax, and therefore cannot do something productive with that money. It’s the broken window fallacy. There’s no way to know what has been lost to taxation.
What we do know is that businesses respond differently to changes in taxation than do individuals. This is true primarily because businesses almost always have a wider range of options open to them. But like the rest of us, businesses will seek to pay as little tax as possible. After all, as you noted, taxation has negative impacts on customer service, employee salaries, product quality, product price, and of course profit.
I also find it ironic that someone in the Internal Revenue Service supports the so-called “Fair Tax.”
Dissent
Apr 20, 2007
As long as you’re talking about the IRS, perhaps you should include this:
“…. Her arrest contributed to a grim statistic for Fresno’s IRS regional service center. Since April 1, 2001, 30 local IRS employees have been prosecuted for illegally accessing tax data — far and away the most from the nation’s 10 regional service centers.
Austin, Texas, and Kansas City, Mo., are the next highest with five each.
At first look, the cases seem like identity-theft schemes, but Assistant U.S. Attorney Stanley Boone said the employees were simply peeking at the tax files of family, friends and neighbors.”
Source: Fresno Bee
Oh, so they’re just invading our privacy but not stealing our identities? I feel so much better.
Q
Apr 23, 2007
take a hint from clark kent, or bruce wayne. 2 identities are better than one.