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Wisconsin Prints Social Security Numbers on Tax Booklets
Posted on Jan 6, 2007 by Tom Fragala
The Wisconsin Department of Revenue really screwed up. They transferred taxpayer SSN’s to a printer (idiotic, illegal move #1) and the printer dutifully put the SSN’s on 170,000 tax booklets (idiotic, illegal move #2). And no one along the way stopped to THINK why should we put social security numbers where anyone can read them (along with the name and mailing address)?! Channel 3000 has the story.
Thousands of Wisconsinite's Social Security numbers were mistakenly printed on mailing labels for tax forms. The state said more than 170,000 forms were printed. It believes 115,000 of them actually went through the mail system. The others have been recovered.
Filed under: Data Breach, Identity Theft
Tags: identitytheft, idtheft, SSN
Comments
David Taylor on Jan 7, 2007
Speaking of SSNs, the recent breach via computer theft of a contractor to Emory Univ Hospital caused me to look at the contractor's website. Electronic Registry Systems, http://www.ers-can.com/
What I found amazed me: without being a client or even registering, you can query their DB of 78 million records of deaths and pull out SSNs. You can also pull the date of death for each person, making for a really excellent source of identities to steal. Check it out and see if you're as surprised as I was. Dave Taylor, Protegrity.
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Dave,
Great tip. The database you are talking about is actually on the RootsWeb.com web site (part of ancestry.com). And I think it is an atrocity that this information is there. It's flat out wrong and something should be done about it.
--Tom
Truston
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