Nearly 170,000 tax booklets were mailed this week with taxpayers' Social Security numbers printed on the address labels. The booklets delivered in mailboxes are an easy target for identity thieves who could try to access the taxpayers' personal accounts by using the Social Security numbers as verification.
Wisconsin Department of Revenue spokesperson, Meredith Helgerson says the printing company made a programming error causing the Social Security Numbers to show up on the labels. The department issued an apology to taxpayers and said the printing company would be charged for the cost of retrieving any undeliverable forms and reissuing them with correct labels.
Any Wisconsin consumers who are worried about their personal data being picked up by identity thieves should check their credit reports carefully and might even want to consider putting a security freeze on their credit information.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Bankruptcy News and Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.