But New York State is cracking down on such nonsense.    According to New York One, the New York State Senate passed a bill that mandates  criminal background checks for drivers of tour and charter buses. The bill comes shortly after four women were killed when a discount bus bound for Manhattan crashed in Virginia.  The State Assembly is now considering this legislation.

Supporters of the bill also want to crack down on drivers holding licenses under fake names. They argue stricter regulation from City Hall will improve safety in the industry. But since many of the discount bus accidents were caused by driver fatigue, will this bill might not be as effective as some presume.  We shall see.  In any event if there is a significant consideration that driver’s are working under fake names, then background checks should be required.  Also, there are concerns where convicted criminals may be accused of theft, as in stealing from passengers, or sexual assault.   I am sure in a lousy economy with bus tour services and every other touring service in need of business, the last thing they want to deal with is a lawsuit from passengers or surviving family members.  You would think background checks would be far more cost effective than liability issues and subsequent litigation.

For a long time international candidates made fraudulent claims and for the most part they went uncontested. Staffing agencies and employers for a long time accepted the information on CV’s and resumes pretty much at face value.  But no longer.

According to an article in the greatreporter.com, “ The latest Q4 Hudson Report on Employment and HR trends in China surveyed over 1,500 employers across Asia, and found that more than two-thirds (68%) of business respondents across all sectors had encountered candidates being dishonest about their background or experience in their resumes in China, a far higher proportion than in the other markets surveyed in Asia.   The report maintained that media and public relaitons candidates were the most prone to exaggerate their experiences.   Of the candidates interviewed, over 90% admitted to falsifying claims.   The second industry where claims of experience were grossly exaggerated waas the technology sector.  Nealry two thirds of those interviewed admitted to telling those little fibs that made them look better than they actually were.

There are falsified claims in just about every industry.   Everything from education history to work experience may be prone to hyperbole.   Chinese educators say the culture of cheating takes root in high school, where the entry into the better university is highly competitive and those without high marks don’t have a prayer of getting in.  So, I suppose, the next best thing is to lie about getting into the better schools.  While China’s  Ministry of Education ordered back in the 90′s two major antifraud campaigns in the 90s, the results were, to be kind, modest.   Not to besmirch another culture, but even in intelligence practices the more stealthy episodes of life are generally accepted as common practice.  In many cases efforts are even rewarded.

Corra Group has recently started to assemble a wall of shame, neatly framed copies of bogus degrees our client’s candidates offered as “proof” of their graduation.   Not only did some fail to graduate, but more than a few never even attended the college or university.   In terms of employment claims or  the inherent experience one would expect, things are not what they first appear to be.   Sometimes employment mills are used to fill in the gaps when a candidate wasn’t working. And sometimes they either just lie about it or try to stretch the duration of one job so that it ends commensurate with another, thus avoiding any gaps.

With background checks you can verify domestic and international education and employment.   In some cases, especially in the cases of the more senior executives further investigation is required to properly discern the realities of their proclaimed achievements.  A necessity as

Fraudulent claims from international employment candidates, especially from China, have necessitated an increased in employment and education verification background checks for employers looking to recruit applicants from these regions.   Many employment screening services have reported that the growing problem of academic and work qualification fraud in China has lead to increased business from background checking agencies.

For a long time international candidates made fraudulent claims and for the most part they went uncontested. Staffing agencies and employers for a long time accepted the information on CV’s and resumes pretty much at face value.  But no longer.

According to an article in the greatreporter.com, “ The latest Q4 Hudson Report on Employment and HR trends in China surveyed over 1,500 employers across Asia, and found that more than two-thirds (68%) of business respondents across all sectors had encountered candidates being dishonest about their background or experience in their resumes in China, a far higher proportion than in the other markets surveyed in Asia.   The report maintained that media and public relaitons candidates were the most prone to exaggerate their experiences.   Of the candidates interviewed, over 90% admitted to falsifying claims.   The second industry where claims of experience were grossly exaggerated waas the technology sector.  Nealry two thirds of those interviewed admitted to telling those little fibs that made them look better than they actually were.

There are falsified claims in just about every industry.   Everything from education history to work experience may be prone to hyperbole.   Chinese educators say the culture of cheating takes root in high school, where the entry into the better university is highly competitive and those without high marks don’t have a prayer of getting in.  So, I suppose, the next best thing is to lie about getting into the better schools.  While China’s  Ministry of Education ordered back in the 90′s two major antifraud campaigns in the 90s, the results were, to be kind, modest.   Not to besmirch another culture, but even in intelligence practices the more stealthy episodes of life are generally accepted as common practice.  In many cases efforts are even rewarded.

Corra Group has recently started to assemble a wall of shame, neatly framed copies of bogus degrees our client’s candidates offered as “proof” of their graduation.   Not only did some fail to graduate, but more than a few never even attended the college or university.   In terms of employment claims or  the inherent experience one would expect, things are not what they first appear to be.   Sometimes employment mills are used to fill in the gaps when a candidate wasn’t working. And sometimes they either just lie about it or try to stretch the duration of one job so that it ends commensurate with another, thus avoiding any gaps.

With background checks you can verify domestic and international education and employment.   In some cases, especially in the cases of the more senior executives further investigation is required to properly discern the realities of their proclaimed achievements.

Long gone are the days when you can take employment candidates at their word.  As noted earlier, in some cultures, lying about accomplishments and falsifying records is viewed as a pragmatic means of advancing one’s career.   It is considered in some cultures that you should not be punished for falsifying information, you should be rewarded for ingenuity.

So when recruiting new candidates, be careful with your approach.    Sometimes the supposed bargain international student or world experienced executive is in actuality under trained with gaps in that experience and with a  resume or CV peppered with bogus information.   And when you get “proof” of his education, have it verified through a legitimate background checking service.   The vaunted degree literally may not be worth the paper it is printed on.

Long gone are the days when you can take employment candidates at their word.  As noted earlier, in some cultures, lying about accomplishments and falsifying records is viewed as a pragmatic means of advancing one’s career.   It is considered in some cultures that you should not be punished for falsifying information, you should be rewarded for ingenuity.

So when recruiting new candidates, be careful with your approach.    Sometimes the supposed bargain international student or world experienced executive is in actuality under trained with gaps in that experience and with a  resume or CV peppered with bogus information.   And when you get “proof” of his education, have it verified through a legitimate background checking service.   The vaunted degree literally may not be worth the paper it is printed on.

NASDAQ,of course,claims they conducted a background check on Donald Johnson.   But as writer  Joelle Scott puts so succinctly  in Forbes, “But then this brings us to the fundamental difference between a background check (a real one) and a check-the-box-let’s-just-make-sure-he-didn’t-kill-anyone search.  It’s the difference between cloud computing and DOS; an iPod and a Walkman; Toro sushi and Bumble Bee canned tuna…you get the picture.”

Especially when the employment candidate’s name is Donald Johnson.  A common name that requires additional research.  Not to be confused with the accomplished actor of the same name or the million other Donald Johnson’s who populate this earth.   Due diligence is the word of the day.  Especially when the guy is working for NASDAQ or any financial institution where he has access to other people’s money and the ability to defraud them.

Prior to his working for NASDAQ, Johnson admitted to drug abuse while working as a nurse in Virginia.    He falsified records to steal drugs.   Okay, so if you know that the person worked in healthcare, prudence would warrant a healthcare sanctions search, with the FACIS search being the first priority.  Following up with the related health and other regulatory agencies would maybe be a good idea, considering the candidate’s position.

Scott writes this is one of many candidates who lied about education, employment, criminal records, experience, any number of things.  Yes, indeed.  And all vagaries about the direction of the economy notwithstanding, the one thing I can assure you is there will be more candidates lying on their resumes.   In fact, we have seen an upsurge in falsifying claims about college degrees.    We have a wall of bogus diplomas, some of which are pretty shabby and some are impressive replicas and yet one more example of why G-d created Photo Shop.  Of course in some cases, on the diploma, the President of the University and other officiating bodies didn’t have tenure there until ten year after the candidate graduated.  But what the heck.

Anyway, it’s a good article and quite sensible, outlining once again that those who do not conduct or are haphazard abut their background checks are not being cost effective.  In fact, they are very foolish.

Here are some of the additional but important questions asked in a recent article in the Missoulian–

“Should companies test their employees? If a company allows a person to use marijuana on the job, what happens if that person does something that creates a dangerous situation? Does the presence of marijuana in the bloodstream mean that a worker is impaired?”

To be…or not to be…stoned…that is the new question for which few have concrete answers.  There are the state law allowing for the legal licensing of medical marijuana, the the federal laws prohibiting the intake of marijuana, medical or not.

This is an ongoing issue and will not subside anytime soon.  I suspect we will have assorted rulings from different courts until this whole issue is finally resolved.   I have written about this issues many times now, including one recent article entitled, Background Checks for the Medical Marijuana Permit.  In that article, I ask if there will eventually be a background check verifying the legitimacy and the currency of a medical marijuana permit.   With the prominence of Photoshop and the like,  it would be small wonder of the number of job applicants who present a counterfeit medical marijuana permit, much the same way as we see bogus diplomas that falsify education verification.   For that matter, we even see supposedly legal documents that are supposed to verify that an employment candidate’s criminal records have been sealed or expunged, or plea bargained down to a lesser offense.

But at the end of the day, the largest consideration will revolve around the liability factors an employer may encounter when a stoned employee hurts himself or someone else via a workplace accident of some kind.   What then?  Nobody knows.  Stay tuned.

Not long ago, it was discovered that a worker for the bus company was falsifying information, lying in plain language.   It would appear that the falsification of information was not limited to the one worker, but other bus companies were doing the same.    By hiding key information, including driving records and criminal charges, these “omissions” served to make that bus ride that much more dangerous for the kids.

The bill the Governor signed into  law requires the DMV to conduct background checks on employees hired to make and issue driver’s licenses and identification cards.   The cost of the background checks will be covered by a federal grant.   Money, in my opinion, that is being put to good use.  The new law will also make mandatory fines of $2,500 and will require drivers convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol to install ignition interlock devices for 10 years after conviction.

Background checks will be helpful in keeping the bus companies honest about their drivers.  Nobody needs drunk drivers tooling their children around the city on a school bus.

But then there is the Big Lie.  The Big Lie on one hand defies the realities of background checks.  But on the other hand, if the lie is so big, the human resource manger has to wonder if it is the background check that is in error and not the job applicant.  Apparently Adam Wheeler committed the Big Lie.  In vying for a literary scholarship at the New Republic, Wheeler  claimed at perfect 4.0 Grand Point Average at Harvard University.   His resume boasted a combined 18 prize and scholarship awards.   It is reported in the Huffington Post that Wheeler  was awarded some $14,000in grants and prizes, after submitted plagiarized content.    He received $30, 00 in student aid from Harvard, allegedly under false pretenses.

Wheeler has been charged with four counts of larceny over $250, eight counts of identity fraud, seven counts of falsifying an endorsement or approval and pretending to hold a degree.  While Harvard is zip lipped about how Wheeler could have pulled the proverbial wool over the eyes of one of most prestigious universities, speculators are firing away.   Apparently, Wheeler created documents, including the envelopes, that so mimicked legitimate institutions, to Harvard, his credentials appeared very much intact.

Okay, so the kid lied, cheated and stole some money.   He will probably be punished; how severely is anyone’s guess.     And everyone will tsk-tsk in admonishment, which is appropriate enough.   Grudgingly, perhaps, you do have to give him credit for creativity and initiative.   This kid may turn up somewhere as a leading entrepreneur and his infamous past will be just add-in fodder for the tabloid media.   It is not right what he did, by any means, but he did have the temerity to pull it off.  At least for awhile.  And then like most con artists who don’t know when to stop, he overreached, and it all came crashing down around him.

We often see education verification background checks that are bogus.  As I wrote earlier, sometimes the employment candidate claimed a degree when the background check will report enrollment only.  And sometimes they never attended the school at all.   Wheeler’s case, as I also wrote earlier, is a Big Lie, a monstrous fabrication that surpassed even the more brazen liars we have encountered while conducting background checks. It will remain as one of those offbeat legends, achieving semi-mythical status in some circles.

As for Wheeler getting any more financial awards of scholarships, that’s probably out of the question.

To be clear, in the case of mortgage fraud, everyone was in on the act.  First the house was flipped back and forth behind two conspirators.   They took turns selling the house to each other, back and forth, each time increasing the value of the house.     The real estate agent  artificially pumped up the value of the house.   The appraiser fraudulently verified that the house was worth much more than it actually was.   The prospective buyer who was often a straw person merely put there to pose as the buyer in behalf of the real buyers would falsify documents attesting to salary and net worth far behind his reality.   The real buyers paid him off to do this.  A nice cash reward for a few days work.    And then of course Wall Street brokers packaged these falsely appreciated mortgages into derivatives and sold them off to the speculators.

Everyone was happy.  And then the housing market was so overheated, like a game of musical chairs, payments were late, the mortgages turned  toxic, and the rest is history.  So now, according to an article in RealEstateRama,  The Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System and Registry, known as the NMLS,  will require background checks through the FBI as part of the state application process.    Officiating bodies in all states will be able to review the background check through the NMLS.

This is a proactive move and a sound one.   Probably, things being what they are, these criminal background checks should have been mandated long before.  How much the criminal records searches would have prevented the surfeit of mortgage fraud is anyone’s guess.   But at least now the process is being modified and some of the gaps in security are being corrected.

We applaud the NMLS for taking this action and encourage any other licensing body to do the same, if they are not doing so already.

Check them out before you hire.

Of course in their day,  the world economy was an entirely different phenomenon.   A couple, few centuries conducting background checks and business research had its limitations.   Surely, you could ask around if your borrower or lender was in your proximity, but in the global economy, your lender or borrow may be thousands of miles away.    You need information about them.  You need background checks on the individuals and business credit reports for the corporation.   You need to know who you are dealing with.

Otherwise, heed Shakespeare’s words, or Franklin’s, and pay in cash.  Don’t lend money. Don’t borrow it.  Impractical?  Surely.  Improbable?  Certainly.

But pay heed to such headline grabbing fiasco’s as the two principles who founded Hermosa Beach’s Club Sushi.  right here in South California.  It was a success, or so it appeared.  So much so that other locations were planned.  One in Hollywood and one in San Diego’s Gaslamp District.  But then came trouble.  The restaurant in San Diego never opened.  The one in Hollwyood closed soon after opening.

Now two of the owners are seemingly on the lam.  They are accused of falsifying financial and credit information.    It is alleged they used their partner’s credit information, and when the economy turned they closed down and sold off all the equipment.    They are sought for questioning.    While they are innocent until proven guilty, it is safe to say they have a lot of explaining to do.

A sad story.  True.  but there are many such stories out there, especially in this rotten economy.   The story is a lot sadder, if you were the person or company that lent them money, or gave them the equipment on credit.   You don’t want to be that guy.

So conduct corporate research on anyone you are considering doing a venture with.  If you are borrowing money or lending it, run background checks on the principals of the company as well as business credit reports on the company itself.    The few bucks you spend for the ounce of prevention corporate research can afford you is well worth your peace of mind.  Or you could heed the words of William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin, neither a borrow or lender be.   But that was their world and this is the global economy.   That sage wisdom is not the way you can do business today.  So do the diligence.

Check them out before you do business.

Perhaps one of the few perks of living long enough is you can recognize how things come around in cycles. Be it fashion or issues, or, in this case, the economy, you get to see different patterns emerge. You get to see how the tightening economy elicits the desperation in some.

Desperation in turn breeds irrational judgment and impulsive decisions, which in turn provide a fertile breeding ground for the scam artists of every stripe and variety. These are the swindlers or prey upon your insecurities, who offer through what they term “good deals” and ways to beat the system. While there are ways to beat the system and in fact profit and prosper during dicey economic cycles, the scammers are only out to take your money.

Some of the methods stay the same. But thanks to technology, purveyors of fraud play new angles and work variations on a theme. Thanks to Photo Shop and other software, they can show you Bank Statements and financial statements that will wow you with their number of zeros. They will assure their own financial security by showing you statements listing their assets in the millions. All while asking for you to put up your hard earned money. Not only put it up, but put it up first.

And why must you put it up first? Because their money is tied up somewhere. That is one of the more common excuses. They will lie by telling you their money is tied up in property or in some other way just isn’t liquid. Or, here’s a very popular one, they will tell you they are going through a nasty divorce, and they can’t show their money at the moment. They will request you put up the investment funds for both of you and they will gladly pay you back later.

The sad fact is later never comes around. You are left in the lurch, listening to their excuses about the delays in your joint business proposition. They will tell you that your thing is still “sure,” but there are a few hang ups to overcome. And then there are more delays. And finally, miraculously either the great deal fades away or they do. Leaving you holding the bag.

At Corra we have been approached lately with a lot more fraudulent schemes. Businesses, individuals, financial and equity groups, and attorneys are all requesting business research and records that potentially reveal previous fraudulent or criminal activity. In the course of conducting these background reports we are examining counterfeit financial statements. We discover people living on assumed names or doing business by using the social security numbers of dead people. In fact, some of having been using the decedent’s social security number for so long, it looks legitimate. The social security number first appears as if it belongs to the scammer. Until you look deeper and find out the actual owner of the social security number has been dead a number of years.

At Corra we are also seeing social security numbers in the 700 series. These belonged to retired railroad workers, some of the first to receive social security benefits. The United States government ended the issue or use of these numbers somewhere around 1962. So it’s safe to say there are not many old, dead retired railroad workers participating in fraudulent activity. We are also seeing a few 800 series social security numbers. This series has yet to be issue, legitimately. So be on the lookout for these.

All numbers and documents aside, most scam artists win you over by gaining your confidence, hence the term con artist. They prey on you when you are insecure, when your business is in trouble, or when you are looking for extra bucks to make ends meet. Or, if you are the greedy sort, they prey upon your greed and promise you the type of lucrative returns that sound too good to be true. Because they are too good to be true. Or they are illegal, and more often than not you will end up paying the piper.

The federal government has law enforcement task forces in many major cities, investigating real estate fraud. They are finding rings of realtors, appraisers, mortgage brokers, stand-ins and various and sundry folks who fooled with the numbers to falsify the appraisal value of a house, the net work of the buyer and just about everything else. If you are curious, check your local paper or the national news. Each is filled with stories about this.

But now that the housing market has imploded, the predators are out conning people into investment schemes that will save their personal worth or their businesses. They show you the documents, falsify previous returns and then ask for your money.

Don’t be so quick to leap into anything. With any deal, run background checks and do the corporate research. For suspicious businesses, you can run a business credit report. There are many searches you can conduct for relatively nominal fees. Certainly the fees can save you from being swindled for a lot of money and the embarrassment it brings with it. Nothing is guaranteed. There is always a chance a con artist can slip through the cracks. But due diligence will filter out most of them.

So realize bad times can bring on real opportunity. Legitimate opportunity. But bad times can also bring out the bad people. So watch yourself. As they say in boxing, “protect yourself at all times.”

ID Theft Infects Medical Records

After shoulder surgery last year, Lind Weaver was stunned when hospital bill collectors demanded that she pay for the amputation of her right foot.

“Either you didn’t do the surgery, or you did a really [shoddy] job of it,” Weaver told them, sending along notarized photos of her toes, all still attached. “Either way, I’m not paying.”

But the 56-year-old retired schoolteacher quickly discovered she was dealing with something more nefarious than a simple clerical error: An identity thief had obtained medical care under Weaver’s name and had the bill sent to her insurer.

A year later, Weaver is still trying to catch errors in her medical records and clear the hospital bills fraudulently run up in her name.

“It became a 40-hour-a-week job,” Weaver said. “I put my phone to my ear and sat there listening to elevator music.”

Although the most typical of the millions of identity theft cases in the U.S. each year involve credit cards, a 2003 federal report estimated that at least 200,000 instances involved medical identity fraud. Experts believe that the rising cost of healthcare is driving more identity theft, and that many people are unaware they have become victims unless they receive a hospital bill or query from their insurer.

“There’s no reason to assume the patients ever find out,” said Harvard University management professor Malcolm Sparrow, an expert on regulatory agencies who has written books on healthcare fraud. “The bulk presumably remain invisible.”

With their medical records compromised, victims of this kind of fraud face a greater risk of injury or even death if doctors make treatment decisions based on bad information. Files might list incorrect prescriptions or the wrong blood type. Or, as in Weaver’s case, an erroneous diagnosis of diabetes.

Bad information can also put careers and insurance at risk. Many employers, including more than a third of the Fortune 500 companies, demand access to medical records when making hiring, promotion or benefits decisions, according to the nonprofit Patient Privacy Rights Foundation. Health and life insurance companies routinely scan medical files or payout reports before issuing new policies.

Victims, though, often find that clearing their medical records of bad information is much more difficult than fixing credit reports, which are centralized in three major credit bureaus.

Consumers have the right to obtain one free credit report annually, and to demand an investigation of information they believe is fraudulent or incorrect. Unverified reports must be removed promptly.

Medical records, in contrast, can be scattered across dozens of doctors’ offices, hospitals and clinics. And federal privacy rules intended to protect private information can make it difficult for patients to even obtain their own records when identity theft is suspected.

“These privacy rules might put you in a situation where you can’t even investigate,” said Wilma Kidd, chief privacy officer at WellPoint Inc., the largest U.S. health insurer for employees and other groups.

A big reason most people never find out about erroneous records is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. The law can make it difficult for patients to see their own medical records, since the penalties for improper disclosure prompt some hospitals to set up roadblocks including demands for multiple forms of identification.

The bitter twist on medical identity theft is that once a person tells a keeper of records that someone else’s data might be intermingled, the file becomes even harder to obtain. Why? Because it includes another person’s medical history, which many hospitals argue can’t be turned over without consent.

Even when patients do see their records, they have no automatic right to fix errors they find.

As she battled collection agencies last year, Weaver fought to see her medical files. She suspected that someone had used her identity to obtain a foot amputation, but hospital officials wouldn’t help.

Weaver marched into the hospital waiting room in Bunnell, Fla., and started shouting that the doctors didn’t know who their patients were. That got her service in a hurry. After she was shown to a consulting room and given the file, she soon thought she had weeded out her impostor’s medical history.

In May, Weaver suffered a heart attack at her home in Palm Coast, Fla., and was in and out of consciousness.

When she awoke in her hospital room two days later, a nurse asked Weaver what drugs she had been taking to treat her diabetes. Weaver has never had diabetes, a disease that can lead to foot problems severe enough to require amputation.

“They could have given me insulin,” Weaver said. “There’s a whole different heart procedure that covers people with diabetes.”

Diabetes experts said those procedures would have been unlikely to threaten Weaver’s life. A hospital spokeswoman declined to answer questions about Weaver’s case.

Weaver doesn’t know how her identity was compromised, but identity fraud is easy when so many in the medical field have access to intimate records and patients are admitted without having to prove who they are.

At New York homeless shelters, state Medicaid identification cards once could be rented for as little as $2 a day, said Harvard’s Sparrow, who has seen overlapping pregnancies claimed under the same name. In Veterans Affairs hospitals, some eligible veterans have their identities assumed by brothers or cousins who have easy access to their documents, said Richard Ehrlichman, the department’s assistant inspector general.

Sometimes it’s the doctors who commit identity fraud to collect insurance payments for work they didn’t perform.

A Boston-area psychiatrist, Richard Skodnek, was convicted a decade ago of fraud after falsifying diagnoses, treatment sessions and entire patient histories. His victims, some of whom discovered that their insurance benefits had been exhausted, had to struggle to clear their records.

In perhaps the most sensational case, a Chicago podiatrist under grand jury investigation for exaggerating the work he performed shot and killed one of his patients in 2002 when she refused to lie on his behalf. Ronald Mikos was convicted of the murder last year.

Many insurance companies have hotlines for reporting fraud against them, and they sometimes refuse to pay suspicious hospital bills. But that often doesn’t do the identity theft victims any good: They still have to make their own cases to the hospitals, the bill collectors and the credit agencies.

In Weaver’s case, getting the insurance company involved made things worse.

After Weaver realized she was being billed for an amputation she never had, she told her insurance company, which refused to pay as well. In the hospital’s eyes, that left Weaver responsible for the whole $66,000 surgery bill, instead of just her deductible.

Collection agencies didn’t care about her explanation. Each tacked on a fee and resold the collection contract to the next agency down the line. That made correcting Weaver’s credit report especially difficult, because after she established that she wasn’t responsible for one amount billed on a certain day, the credit bureau would receive notice of a new amount with a different date, even though it was based on the same bogus debt.

Even when identity theft victims avoid health complications, the legal side effects can be terrible.

Anndorie Sachs of Salt Lake City found that out in April during a phone call from Utah’s social services department. The social worker told Sachs that her hospitalized infant had tested positive for methamphetamine. The state planned to take away the baby, along with her siblings at home.

Sachs, a mother of four, said that she hadn’t delivered a baby in two years.

“I was freaking out,” said Sachs, 27. “She was not going to believe a word. She said: ‘You’re Anndorie Sachs. You’re on the birth certificate. We know your other kids are being exposed to this too.’ ”

After the social worker grilled Sachs’ 7-year-old about whether her mother had been to the hospital lately, the agency relented.

Months earlier, Sachs’ driver’s license was stolen from her husband’s car. It eventually emerged that a woman named Dorothy Bell Moran had used that license when she checked into the hospital to give birth. Already wanted on other charges related to identity theft, authorities said, Moran hadn’t wanted to use her own name for fear of getting caught. (She was later arrested on the earlier charges.)

Sachs had to hire a lawyer to disentangle the legal and medical records, and she is still fighting a collection agency over the medical bill.

As with Weaver and other victims interviewed, the Utah hospital cited the health insurance law and refused to show Sachs her files after she told them someone else’s paperwork was included. After Sachs went to the local media, officials agreed to delete both women’s records.

Just to be safe, when Sachs contracted a kidney infection, she chose a hospital that neither she nor the impostor had used. But some records had been shared electronically, and the hospital had the impostor’s blood type down as Sachs’ — setting up a possible fatal error. Fortunately, staffers had drawn blood and double-checked. When they reviewed other data with Sachs, she found they also had the wrong emergency contact name and number.

The increased use of electronic records such as the ones that dogged Sachs could worsen the spread of medical errors caused by identity theft.

In the last year, the Senate and the House have passed broad bills pushing for wider use of electronic health records. Supporters, including many big technology firms and insurers, said the plan would increase efficiency, reduce error rates and provide earlier warnings about public health problems.

Such a system could also make correcting medical errors easier — but only if patients catch them beforehand, and only if the service providers agree to change them.

As the web of electronic distribution expands beyond the current pilot projects, more people will see medical records. That could increase identity theft while making existing errors harder to resolve, said Joanne McNabb, chief of the California Office of Privacy Protection.

“There is added risk that we’ve seen all over the place with electronic data,” McNabb said. “It can go to the wrong place at the wrong time very easily.”

Corra found this article to be particularly scary. Not only will you feel victimized when someone commits healthcare fraud with your medical insurance policy, but you will spend eons of time trying to straighten it out. We all know how long it takes to get a simple answer from a health care provider. We all have spent hours in phone menu hell, listening to bad music while waiting for someone to talk to. Just imagine trying to explain to the first three people you talk to that someone identity thief used your insurance policy for his or her medical needs. Years, and I mean this literally, could pass before your straighten things out.

Then there is the matter, mentioned in the article, that the hospital or doctors can mistake your medical condition for that of the identity thief. Suddenly, you could find yourself taking the wrong pills or worse, much worse, udnergoing the wrong surgery. This kind of treatment happens on a good day, yet alone when supported by an erroneous but official medical file.

As we have said before, identity theft begins with two pieces of information–your date of birth and your social security number. These two bits of information are the keys that can potentially unlock your credit and finances, and your health care policy. Not only is this a painful experience, and not only can you spend years awash in red tape, it can also be terribly expensive.

Do yourself a favor and run a Social Security Trace, periodically. The Social Security Trace will inform you who else may be representing your number as their own. Awareness, after all, is the first step toward being proactive, and the SSN trace will make you aware of interlopers.

Run a credit check periodically to see who else may be using your hard earned credit. Run your credit and look for names other than your own. If you find any, notify the credit agencies right away. If the identity thieves have taken cards in your name, then notify the credit providers immediately. Certain undocumented workers may get hold of your number and use it to pose as legal workers. This may be benign and simply stop there, or they may become more creative and try to open up credit on your account. More often than not, it is simply for work purposes, although they can pass it out to their twenty best friends. We have seen it at Corra, and have reviewed more than our fair share of undocumented persons with criminal records in possession of someone else’ social security number.

Remember, all this talk about Homeland Security and Personal Security isn’t just talk. Bad stuff is really happening out there and, largely, you are on your own in finding protection from the predators and identity thieves that have no compunction about causing you grief.

Corra says–You have one identity. Keep it for yourself.