A special congressional task force convened last week to plug a legal loophole that allows the identities of dead people to be easily stolen.
The goal of the Death Master File Task Force is to find a way for the Social Security Administration (SSA) to speed up its notification process to financial institutions and credit bureaus of a person’s death, according to a statement by the task force’s co-chairmen, Reps. Sue Kelly (R-NY) and Clay Shaw (R-FL).
“The goal of the task force in the next four months is to reduce the amount of time it takes to process the information from 30 days to 10 days,” the statement said.
It takes four to six weeks to notify financial institutions and credit bureaus of deaths through the Death Master file. At the task force meeting, the SSA committed to a weekly release of the death data to the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) which distributes the information to credit bureaus, credit card issuers and other financial institutions. The NTIS plans to electronically release the data starting in February to further speed the process.
The task force was created after a series of investigations determined the ease in which thieves can steal and illegally use identities of the deceased. In one incident, a man suspected of being involved in the Sept. 11 attacks had illegally used the Social Security Number of a New Jersey woman who died 10 years ago, according to the statement.
The goal of the task force was applauded by Jerry Cerasale, the Direct Marketing Association’s senior vice president of government affairs, who noted that there “are a lot of good identity theft laws on the books, but they are not enforced as hard as they should be.”
Curtailing the time between a death and the notification to the financial services industry dovetails with the Associated Credit Bureaus’ (ACB) recently launched program of quickly passing on death notices received from the SSA to its members, noted Stuart K. Pratt, vice president of government relations for the ACB, in a statement.
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