Wis. firm, agency wanted error kept mum

Wis. firm, agency wanted error kept mum

	Published : Fri, 02 Feb 2007 00:10 By : Agencies Print this Story

MADISON, Wis. (AFX) - A company that printed thousands of Wisconsin taxpayers' Social Security numbers with their addresses on state Department of Revenue mailings tried to convince the agency to keep the mistake quiet, e-mail records indicate.

Revenue officials initially agreed taxpayers should not be notified, according to e-mails obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request. One official even expressed hope that people wouldn't recognize the digits as Social Security numbers simply because the dashes were missing.

The agency notified the public Dec. 29 after news organizations -- tipped off by angry taxpayers -- rejected their pleas to hold off on the story.

'The press is going with it despite my plea,' Revenue spokeswoman Meredith Helgerson wrote in an e-mail to a colleague at 4:43 p.m. that day, several hours after taxpayers started calling to complain.

Two hours later, Helgerson sent out a brief statement apologizing for the problem.

Helgerson acknowledged Thursday that the agency's first instinct was not to immediately inform the public, explaining that doing so also would have alerted would-be identity thieves. But she said the agency quickly decided taxpayers should know so they could quickly retrieve their mail.

'We decided we really had to get it out on the same day it was brought to our attention,' she said.

Ripon Community Printers mistakenly printed Social Security numbers on the address section of about 171,000 booklets mailed to taxpayers in late December.

No cases of identity theft have been attributed to the glitch, but the company and the state have agreed to cover a year's worth of free credit monitoring for those affected.

Andy Lyke, Ripon's president, asked the agency Jan. 29 'that we do not publicize this event at this time,' according to an e-mail Martin Wright, a Revenue official in charge of the agency's mailroom, wrote to colleagues.

'His reasoning is that the mistake is out there and if we publicize it at this time someone with bad intentions could go looking for this data and use it in an unscrupulous manner,' Wright wrote.

Wright wrote he agreed with Lyke that many people wouldn't even notice the mistake.

'Hopefully an unknowing person will not realize this is a social security number as the nine numbers just run together and are not in the typical social security number format,' he wrote.

The company and the agency on Thursday denied they wanted to cover up the mistake.

Department executive assistant Audra Brennan said Deputy Secretary Laura Engan made the decision to notify the public and it 'had nothing to do with what the press was or was not going to do.'

'Once all the information was presented to the person in charge of making the decision, it was an immediate decision to notify taxpayers,' Brennan said.

Lyke said he only wanted the press to wait a few days before reporting it, after people had a chance to get their mail, to reduce the risk of identity theft.

'The press made the situation a whole lot worse. I'm convinced of that,' he said. 'It alerted anyone who had any kind of ill-intent that these numbers were out there.'

The department has acknowledged it had no reason to give the numbers to the company. It has ordered contractors to purge nonessential information from files and promised to appoint a privacy specialist and develop unique identification numbers for taxpayers.