Saturday, December 22, 2012

The Arrogance Of Government "Protection"

Today - 1700 miles and 5 years away from South Carolina - I received a letter from the Department of Revenue, State of South Carolina. It advised me that my 'account' - where I have filed taxes since I was 18 - was probably hacked and that I should be on the lookout for any use of my SSN, tax info, etc. The records stolen go back to 1998. Of course they hasten to assure me that no one has reported any use of this information, and that they have established an account for me at one of those 'information-lock' sites.

Seven years ago, I received a letter from the Department of Revenooers. That letter was not so nice. It said that they knew - HAD PROOF! - that I had worked for some place I had never heard of, and that I owed them $5000 more in taxes. Well, I protested. They shrugged. Not their problem; they had PROOF. So I found the owner (retired) of the business where they claimed I'd worked - and she said that I was not the first person to contact her. (I had to track her down in another state, btw.) Apparently I was one of several people. I faxed her what I had, and she faxed me a letter stating that I had never worked for her. I sent it all to the DOR. They sent me a brief statement that they had gotten it... but that I still had to prove that I had not worked there!

 Well, you can't prove a negative (as government bureaucracies intimately know). So I picked up the phone and called my buddy, Joe Wilson, and told him about it. After some investigation at the Federal level, it turned out that at least 15 people - and several companies - in SC alone had fallen prey to this scam.

This all puts me in mind of another bureaucratic fiasco; when, 15 years ago, our idiot SC Legislature wanted to sell all of their constituents' drivers' license info to a company that promised to put a "life-lok" type of credit assurance on every single person's ID. Well, I and several hundred other people testified at the Legislative Judicial Committee's hearing against this idiocy - even if the state would get $.07 per license out of it. The most telling testimony (and the one that shut the house down) was the friend who brought his laptop into the chamber with him... and with the flick of a few keys, pulled up the Chairman's granddaughter's full DL information. "If I were a stalker, sir..." he drifted off.   End. /30/. The Legislature voted to not do this... and two years later, we discovered that the whole thing was a scam - not by some salacious profit-seeking entity, but by our own Federal government, set up to gather as much info about as many people as possible.

With "watchdogs" like these guarding our 'precious' information, how - or, why - should we trust them with anything?

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