The Joy Of Privatization
The Miami Herald reports that Bogus tax returns filed with cops’ IDs
Tax Day this year is bringing an unpleasant surprise to many South Florida police officers and firefighters — someone stole their identities and filed fraudulent returns in their names.
The culprits accessed personal information, possibly through city pension funds administered by a private company. The breach initially appeared to affect up to 400 cops and firefighters in Oakland Park and Delray Beach, but has expanded to include about 125 employees in Davie and at least one police officer in Lauderhill.
The company involved had earlier to contacted a few of its clients to say that is was possible that some records might be compromised.
The scam involved e-filing using the stolen information, and including a bogus $1000 educational tax deduction to increase the refund checks.
Maybe after they catch some of the perps, they can have them do a PSA on how easy e-filing is.
To err is human. To really screw up you need a computer.
21 comments
“To err is human. To really screw up you need a computer.”
And an Internet connection. To commit the finest of identity thefts, you need the ‘net.
When I arranged with my accountant to e-file my return, we worked it out so that on no single transmission (email or fax) did any great amount of my essential information appear, and for some of the most critical info (e.g., my SSN), he took it from his local copies of earlier years’ filings, so it never went out over the intertubes even once. Now, if it’s stolen, I’ll know it was stolen from IRS.
(OT: your left sidebar John Rogers quote is also out there with a different attribution. I don’t know which one is correct.)
I don’t ever do anything that involves personal information that isn’t at a secure site that I know, and I know requires the information. I still buy and use stamps.
OT: The name is linked to the source at Kung Fu Monkey in March of 2009, and it is at the end of a post that is in that style of snark. I have seen it unattributed several places but a couple of places pointed to John, and one linked to the actual post.
Oh, the basic “disgruntled employee” with a data stick is quite capable of stealing all of a business’s records, which is why you should always make sure your employees are gruntled.
I have a feeling a clerk at any of the jurisdictions served, as well as everyone in the company involved could have accessed every record in their data base. Security is the last thing small businesses think of.
Standing in lines in the Post Office near tax day is no longer an option for me, and the post offices I know, while some are (at least in theory) barrier-free, seem never to have considered that some people cannot stand upright, even with a standard walker, for long periods of time. The PO in which I have my box is also not particularly friendly to wheelchair-bound people, because of the heights of all counters. At least Houston is not NYC… people seldom drop swinging doors in my face… but the obstacles to my filing my taxes that way are considerable. All in all, I’m better off e-filing, even with all the problems of doing so.
I also can no longer drive to my accountant’s office, which is about 10 mi away along Houston’s scariest freeway. I no longer “do” freeways at all. They’re bad enough even for people who don’t use hand controls. But if my accountant has all the info and produces the return himself, all he needs from me is an e-signature and an authorization for him to file for me. It’s the best I can do; really tight security would require me to do things I am no longer able to do.
I don’t go to the post office, I give things to the letter carrier, or put them in the mail box and flip up the flag. It it is sensitive I use the locked out-going mail box that the USPS has in the multi-unit box for the apartments behind me.
I do go to the UPS Store to ship my Mother’s Christmas packages, but I could just prepared them for USPS shipping and the Post Office would pick them up at her house. That’s what my younger brother does with everything. He can’t get out, and uses the services offered for just about everything.
I do my own taxes, and always have. No program, just a spreadsheet and a data base of expenses that would make no sense for anyone else’s business.
My town was fairly good on wheelchair access, then some consultant convinced them to replace the regular sidewalks on both sides of the main street with brick, What a PITA for anything wheeled. You need a mouth-guard to ride a bike or use a wheelchair on the new sidewalks.
We are still a single-story area, so it isn’t as bad as it could be, and there are ramps and automatic doors at most places, but you are right about the counter heights at the post office. There must be a regulation about it somewhere, because most of the clerks at the local post office stand on something when they are working and it is quite a lift for packages. That’s why I use the UPS Store, the package counter is low. It may not seem like much of a reason, but it is the real reason I go there.
Oh, I don’t have a problem with e-filing through the IRS. Their system seems to be solid, it is all of the commercial systems I don’t trust. Security costs money, and their goal is to maximize profits. From a carbon and recycling standpoint, the more you can safely do over the ‘Net the better, but people have to take security and privacy seriously.
“I have a feeling a clerk at any of the jurisdictions served, as well as everyone in the company involved could have accessed every record in their data base.”
Heh. In the early 1990s I did some work for a major oil company. One problem I occasionally faced was sitting down to my workstation only to find that the network directories containing my work were simply not there. The reason was pretty obvious, and not what you’d think at first: every blessed account had “move” privileges on every directory in the developer part of the network. If anyone got careless, they could easily drag-drop a whole folder tree “somewhere else”. I learned to depend on the network folks to find where “somewhere else” was; they were used to it and didn’t get aggravated the way I did.
“I do my own taxes, and always have. No program, just a spreadsheet …”
I did the same for decades, down to the custom spreadsheet. Then there came a time at which a combination of complexity of the business and the fact of having made some investments (bad ones, though who knew then) made things just messy enough that I hired an accountant.
“I don’t ever do anything that involves personal information that isn’t at a secure site that I know, and I know requires the information.”
I rarely if ever buy anything online; online shopping is Stella’s pleasure, not mine. But recently I’ve started doing my banking/bill payment through BoA online. It costs zip and avoids the very real risk, in this neighborhood, of bills getting lost in the mail. I actually used a stamp this week, to mail my final fees to my union and resign in good standing. (Sigh!) Not surprisingly, they don’t have an online payment facility.
“We are still a single-story area… / … / That’s why I use the UPS Store, the package counter is low.”
Most businesses here do a decent job of complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act (though some make it known they don’t give a damn). Ramps at the PO containing my box are everywhere they need to be, if a bit steep in places. But the UPS Store I used to use is about 15 mi out Houston’s second scariest freeway, followed by another few miles out one of those nightmarish industrial park roads. They finally built a closer location after I’d already shut down my business; it was handy when my camera had to be sent to Japan for fully-covered warranty repairs. (Or was that FedEx? I can’t remember, or as Alberto always said, I don’t recall.)
I’d be happy if I could use USPS for everything, but the reliability just isn’t there in this area. I long wistfully for late 19th-century London, where letter service delivered sometimes 8 times a day. Reportedly, it actually worked.
Steve, I would not wish BofA upon my worst enemy. They lose paperwork and have multiple IT systems that don’t communicate with each other so one department can send a clean-out crew to your just-bought house (where BofA was former mortgage holder) a month after the BofA-approved short sale happened (and getting that BofA approval is itself a nightmare since the short-sale department and foreclosure department don’t talk to each other). At present the best-run big bank from a standard of IT systems appears to be Wells Fargo (disclaimer: a friend of mine was the original architect of their online systems and managed their IT department for many years so I may be biased, but actual use of their system appears to back this claim). BofA on the other hand is one nightmare story after another.
I actually “bank” with the former Lockheed credit union, which, with the spinning down of Lockheed’s R&D efforts with the end of the Cold War, has been opened to everybody in this county. Needless to say with its former clientelle of rocket scientists and its current clientelle of computer geeks its systems are pretty much up to snuff, though there are still some annoying things that don’t work right — to open an IRA, for example, I had to go in personally and do it, they have a by-mail way of doing it that relies on the web site printing out forms for you, but the web site printed out the wrong forms and utterly confused the poor girl who received them in the mail. But they’re local and you can even talk to the actual president of the credit union himself if you have a problem that can’t be solved by other people, because he has an office right there in the actual credit union. I will never again use one of those big national banks, at least nowhere that I have a choice.
I’m not sure what’s up with the USPS. You can’t even buy stamps at the post office anymore in my area unless the lobby area is open and you buy them from a clerk, they’ve taken out all the stamp machines. Luckily I can pay my bills through the credit union’s bill pay site, so I rarely need stamps today. Mailing those papers to the credit union was the first time I’d used a stamp in months…
My employer’s payroll is outsourced through ADP. The reality is that the intricacies of the tax code and dealing with benefits have gotten to the point that a small business with field people in multiple states simply can’t do their own payroll anymore. Just coordinating multiple benefits packages between those multiple states is a nightmare, each state has its own choice of insurers to use, there is no “national” health insurance like Medicare for small business to buy into. It annoys me that my payroll info is probably on half the computers in India, but what can ya do?
Yeah, Badtux, BofA is an accident waiting to happen. I had an account there once in Monterey, and then an account down here after my local bank got eaten by three larger banks in succession, BofA being the last.
That said, the way Houston is apparently laid out, Steve probably doesn’t have much of a choice. I can walk to three different banks, including a BofA within three blocks. Within two blocks I can eat Italian, Japanese, Thai, or fast food. I can walk to a supermarket. It is different if you have to drive because of the distance.
I understand your predicament, Steve. What I don’t understand is the attitude of many businesses. Almost all of the changes you make for the ADA makes life easier for everyone. Curb ramps are a lot easier for us all and eliminate a tripping hazard. Wide doors are benefit going both ways. Some people just seem to believe that anything that helps others steals something from them personally. You will have a hard time staying in business if you exclude customers.
“… eaten by three larger banks in succession, BofA being the last.”
That’s precisely what happened to me. A local S&L was first swallowed by NCNB (which I rendered as “no choice; new bank”), in turn gobbled by NationsBank, which became (was swallowed by?) BofA. I’m too old and tired to trouble trouble by changing banks at this point.
“Some people just seem to believe that anything that helps others steals something from them personally.”
Conservatism is the notion that every interaction with every person or business or (especially) government agency is a zero sum game. I understand the origin, but that must be a helluva way to live.
BadTux, the only institution I could conceivably walk to is a public library 2 blocks away, and I never attempt that… I could easily get stuck there at closing time with no physical ability to get home. The nearest pharmacy is 4 oversized blocks. The nearest grocers are a Sellers Bros. (Hispanic grocery) that requires crossing three (3) major thoroughfares, and Whole Paycheck, about 6 blocks away, which requires only one bad-on-foot street crossing, but, well, it’s Whole Paycheck. There’s a reason that even healthy people don’t walk to their errands in Houston.
Steve, swap Barnetts for NCNB and the situation is identical. NationsBank didn’t even have time to install a permanent sign before it was bought out.
The problem is all of the different IT systems involved when this happens. The original bank was using a homegrown Unix system put together by a group of local programmers in their spare time from their real jobs working for government contractors at the base. That would have been “interesting” to integrate into a regional system, as this was a single branch bank that served the local businesses.
My account number only had two significant digits, and when it was bought out only four digits were needed, but it had a prime location, and a building constructed with hurricanes in mind.
When there’s only one cookie left on the plate, my reaction is not to fight over the last cookie, but to bake more.
Do you see the real estate market picking up at all this year? I work in RE and it is frustrating because so many people are afraid to make any moves 🙁
Other than “vulture buyers”, nothing is moving in Florida. There are too many new, but vacant houses, foreclosed houses, and home=owners severely under-water, while the unemployment rate is higher than the national average and banks are holding a lot shaky real estate loans.
The “vulture buyers” are equity partnerships buying at what they think is the bottom of the price curve, intending to resell later, but if the houses/condos aren’t maintained they will deteriorate rapidly in the climate.
We have military units being transferred into the local area, but their housing is being purpose-built, and won’t affect the local real estate market, but will impact the local infrastructure. The property taxes have been cut to the point that they don’t actually cover costs.
If there isn’t some job growth, things are going downhill even further.
Bryan, beware of link farmers. For example, a real estate site might hire link farmers (generally some folks being paid $3/day in India) to spam any blog that mentions real estate in any context with some generic pre-fab real estate related spam, but the backlink goes to a domain that they’re building up links to in order to increase its Google-fu so that at some point in the future they can slide something else underneath it. The Indian link farmers are paid manually log in to blogs all over the Internet and post stuff that makes perfect sense but the username backlink goes to, say, foo.net. Type the username backlink of the post you responded to into Google Blog Search and you’ll see you’ve been farmed :).
I know, and watch for them, but the question was cogent and applicable so I let it through for a while, unlike the other 200 this month who were doing cut and paste commenting.
OT: you can’t be finishing cleaning already?
No, not finished cleaning already, still not finished cleaning the kitchen (I *hate* cleaning ovens, yuck!), then there’s the bathroom and two bedrooms and my office (now *that* is going to be interesting, given how many computer components are scattered around, I guess I’ll need another one of those plastic bins), but a penguin has to take a break from time to time :). I’ll probably be cleaning well into next week, between all the de-cluttering, carpet shampooing, mopping, and shuffling of tubs of excess computer components and camping gear to storage… heck, the pile of camping gear from my last trip is *still* sitting in the middle of my music / camping gear room and needs to be put away in its tubs. Sigh!
Never do today what can be put off until tomorrow. As long as tomorrow never comes, you save yourself a lot of work. 😉
Dirt is easy, but clutter requires decisions. I have crates of what are now antique parts that I brought with me from California sitting in my shed, I should get rid of them, but that would require actually looking in all of the crates and deciding what’s obsolete.
I actually went through most of my crates of antique parts last spring and hauled a couple crates full of obsolete junk to the local electronics recycling joint. What I kept mostly was small stuff that’s otherwise hard to come by, things like EDO memory, that some small devices still useful require (like my old Samsung laser printer).
Unfortunately electronic components appear to be related to rabbits. They multiply, from what I can tell. Especially when I rebuilt my big server computer system this fall, and ended up going through a basketful of components before finding a set that was 100% compatible with VMware ESXi, OpenSUSE 11.3 XEN VT-d PCI passthrough,Red Hat Fedora 14 VT-d PCI passthrough, and Windows Server 2008R2 with Hyper-V (this machine has a 2 1/2″ slot on the front so I can run whatever OS I feel like running based on my current whim by just turning it off, grabbing the boot drive off the shelf above the computer, replacing the previous boot drive, and starting it back up again)…
Ah, yes, the nagging worry that as soon as you get rid of it, it will be exactly what you need to fix something that they are no longer making parts for.
The key is determining which bits are currently universally supported because they haven’t been dumped as “old technology” and aren’t so new that the drivers haven’t been written yet, but are popular enough that the drivers will be written.
Tis a puzzlement…
‘Tis a puzzlement indeed, Bryan. Finding the magic intersection of hardware support for all these different operating systems has gotten easier, however — I just look at the ESXi hardware compatibility list and choose supported hardware from that list. With the exception of video cards (which I chose using the XEN PCI Passthrough compatibility list, because ESXi doesn’t officially support PCI passthrough of video cards, though it *will* do it, I know because I’ve done it). Basically Linux and Windows are both at the point now where if it’s server hardware, it’s going to be supported, because vendors simply won’t release server hardware without first making sure there’s drivers for the two main server operating systems. ESXi is now the wildcard there, since VMware wrote their own sort-of-Xen-with-KVM kernel for ESXi that is sorta-but-not Linux, meaning that Linux drivers won’t work with it.
As for the spare parts, six months after I recycled my last PCI video card, I suddenly had the need for a PCI video card for a project. Oops! That said, I’m not missing my Celeron 300A motherboard, or the ISA sound card, or any of the rest of that antique junk I got rid of because it isn’t of any conceivable use anymore…
There is a local group that rehabs machines for non-profits, and I have done some work with them that used up a lot of the stuff, so if it is known good, they’ll get it, but the rest needs to stop clogging up my limited storage space and filling up crates that are useful in their own right.
Every time I think back to the “good old days” I still remember when adding things to the early systems meant writing a driver for CPM, or waiting for someone else to do it, because the manufacturers were too limited to support the micros. The joys of getting an 8-inch hard-formatted diskette drive to work with a Z80 motherboard. -Standards … we don’t need no stinkin’ standards.
I have always been amused by the number of IT people who are professed libertarians, when they are so dependent on having a somewhat controlled environment. I remembered when there were no controls, the Galt Gulch period, and it sucked. On any given day thousands of people were inventing the “wheel”.