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.