Report Cites Lack of Government ID Theft Database

Despite growing reports of identity theft there is no way of determining the real number of its victims, according to the General Accounting Office.

In a report sent last week to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, (D-CA), the GAO said there is no single government hotline or database that captures the universe of identity theft victims. Feinstein is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on technology, terrorism and government information.

Statistics are kept by a number of individual organizations including the Federal Trade Commission, the Social Security Administration, the Secret Service and the FBI, but they do not share the data.

Feinstein is one of a dozen lawmakers in both the House and Senate to introduce anti-identity theft legislation during the past year.

Feinstein’s bill, S-1399, which was introduced last September, would change the way direct marketers collect and use customer data. It requires companies that intend to collect and market a customer’s personal data, name, address, phone number and other non-sensitive information to give the customer a chance to opt out of the sale if they choose. And they would have to obtain a customer’s permission to sell, rent, or license “sensitive” data, such as Social Security Number, driver’s license number and financial and health information.

Because that bill and the others are stuck in committee, there is little hope that they will be acted upon before the 107th Congress expires next January.

“It is difficult to fully or accurately quantify the prevalence of identity theft [because] some individuals do not even know that they have been victimized until months after the fact and some victims may choose not to report [it] to the police, credit bureaus or established [government] hotlines,” the GAO report said.

And, because there are no hard statistics, the GAO, Congress’s investigative arm, said it was difficult to determine the actual cost of identity theft to the public, estimated by some to be in the billions of dollars.

The GAO did note, however, that between 1998 and the middle of last year, the Social Security Administration reported a fivefold increase in the fraudulent use of individual Social Security Numbers. Additionally the FTC, which earlier this year listed identity theft as leading the pack in consumer fraud complaints, recorded 94,100 identity fraud complaints on its Identity Theft Data Clearinghouse since its November 1999 opening.

The GAO also said that the two largest credit card issuers, Visa and MasterCard, reported that losses from identity theft grew from about $700 million in 1996 to $1 billion in 2000.

“Given indications that the prevalence and cost of identity theft have increased in recent years…there is a general consensus that the opportunities for identity theft are not likely to decline,” the report concluded while indirectly urging increased state and federal cooperation to combat it.