Wednesday, March 16, 2005

More on Privacy

Today’s mail brought a tax lien from the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office that prominently displayed the taxpayer’s social security number. In yesterday’s blog entry, I explained that in most cases we will not record documents containing social security numbers. State and federal tax documents, however, are the exception. About a year ago I raised the identity theft issue in relation to social security numbers on state tax liens with an official from DOR. The response, to paraphrase, was “if they paid their taxes they wouldn’t have to worry about it.” More recently, I’ve seen a recognition by some at DOR that this is a problem, but the social security numbers continue to appear. It’s probably time to set up a meeting. The IRS also routinely puts social security numbers on liens that are recorded here. The challenge we face at the registry is not just for future documents. We have thousands of previously recorded tax liens (and other documents) that contain social security numbers. Removing this sensitive information from these records on such a large scale requires some kind of formal legal authority I believe. Even if we obtain that, the task of finding then redacting this information will be a huge project. But, no matter how much we try to ignore it, it’s not going away, so we might as well start to address it now.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your BLOG seems to be an unprofessional practice considering that it appears to be publish at the expense of the citizens. perhaps you should address that. the registry of deeds should convey a more conservative approach....

Anonymous said...

Dick,

I understand your concern with privacy issues, but also agree with the DOR sentiment about the taxpayer protecting his own identity by paying his or her taxes.

The purpose of recording a lien is to place the world on notice of the existence of the lien of the state or IRS on the assets of the person. Anyone dealing with him will be able to know that such a lien exists and caution should be used because the government may have the ability to later seize the property. Taxpayer id #'s are the best way to particularly identify an individual with certainty, the certainty that one should be able to have when faced with an ambiguous name.

The id #'s protect the public and I for one hope that we will continue to have that information available to us.

Bob Moriarty
Marsh, Moriarty, Ontell & Golder
Boston, MA