Government Technology - July 2008 - (Page 27)

“Should we really endanger the citizens’ information to make it easier for the researchers?” John Pescatore, vice president, Gartner 40,000 to 50,000 UCCs annually, and roughly 40 percent of them came with SSNs before 2005. After 2005, privacy concerns caused a dramatic shift among lenders away from requiring SSNs on those documents. Now Maryland receives about 50 UCC documents with SSNs per year from “old-time lenders,” said Young. He contends that lenders nationwide rarely require SSNs. The California Secretary of State’s Office urges people to make sure their UCC documents don’t have SSNs before submitting them to the state. Online Death Certificates Concerns about personal information in online public documents don’t end with SSNs. Death certificates aren’t automatically public records, but they become that when citizens submit them to county recorders’ offices. Some states, such as Florida forbid online birth certificate images due to privacy concerns. “It varies dramatically across the United States,” Foglesong said. Other states, such as Arizona, Nevada and Colorado, allow those images online. The Maricopa County, Ariz., Recorder’s Office publishes death certificates with SSNs redacted, but a lot of information attractive to identity thieves remains. A person’s death certificate is his or her personal history in a nutshell. It contains a spouse’s name, a mother’s maiden name and the person’s spouse’s maiden name. The certificate will report one’s residence, place of birth and describe one’s career. It will also contain the person’s signature, which especially angers Ostergren. “My husband is a professional engineer. Why in the world would we want our signatures on the Internet? We do banking with those signatures, and he writes his on his seal when he does drawings,” Ostergren said. She said lifting signatures from online public documents is easy if they’re in PDF files. Pescatore said online death certificates were a bad idea. “There are certain things, like birth certificates and death certificates, that are such aids to identity theft that the negative side of making them easily accessible outweighs the positive side,” he said. What is the positive side of making death certificates available online? People use death certificates to prove themselves sole owners of properties they once co-owned with people now deceased, usually spouses. A homeowner doesn’t get a new deed when his or her spouse dies. How would a bank know that a spouse was really dead without a county-recorded death certificate? It’s the only document lenders accept from the surviving spouse as proof of sole ownership. Maricopa County provides death certificates online to help citizens accelerate that process, said LeeAnn Wade, office manager of the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. She said forcing citizens to visit government offices or attain this information through the mail would impede commerce. “We strive for customer service, and that’s why we have our records out there so we can make it as easy as we can for the public to obtain this information,” Wade said. She acknowledged death certificates are packed with information that identity thieves could use, although she had never heard of it happening with information from the Recorder’s Office. She said the agency wasn’t willing to take the records offline given that numerous opportunities for identity thieves would remain elsewhere. The Recorder’s Office is currently shopping for a more flexible redaction software package that would enable it to remove other information new laws might aim to redact. Wade is concerned that if the state goes redactioncrazy, the online versions of the documents will become useless. “If you’re trying to prove somebody died, how do you do that? Some of that personal information has to still be there,” Wade said. “The death certificate has to have an original signature. Is that going to be the next thing that has to go out? Other people review our records whether via the Internet or whether they purchase CDs from our office. Title companies do that; they update their title plans. If I’ve got everything redacted, where does commerce proceed?” GT Take Public CIO Magazine’s Enterprise Systems Management Survey AND RECEIVE COMPLIMENTARY ACCESS TO THESE INDEPENDENT REPORTS: Forrester: Managing IT When Times Get Tough, March 2008 Forrester: Market Overview: The IT Management Software Market in 2008, March 2008 To participate go to: www.public-cio.com/enterprisesurvey 27 http://www.public-cio.com/enterprisesurvey http://www.public-cio.com/enterprisesurvey http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - July 2008

Government Technology - July 2008 Point of View The Last Mile Big Picture On the Scene Four Questions for ... Generation 2.0 at Work Dangerous Convenience Tainted Justice? Are You Ready? E-Discovery Basics Smart Docs Advanced Math Online Video Blues Spectrum Personal Computing Products signal:noise

Government Technology - July 2008

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