Thread: IGNORANCE IS BLISS: Playing the I-didn't-know card

By Vicki Crawford
IGNORANCE IS BLISS: Playing the I-didn't-know card

Posted May 7, 2009

As a little kid going to second grade I thought I had struck gold. Living within the city limits of Cushing, Oklahoma, meant no bus service from the school district, but that didn't matter much to me. I had a bike which not only meant I could zip to and from school like the wind (I went every where on the bike fast), it also opened up a vast world to explore (just as long as I was home before dark).

One of my numerous expeditions resulted in the discovery in my neighborhood of a small abandoned home. While some kids would have envisioned the home as a potential clubhouse, fort, or whatnot, I was more interested in the yard that surrounded the home.

Whoever had once lived there had been a gardener, or had an interest in horticulture for the yard, even in its unkempt state, was a statement for the love of plants. There was honeysuckle, roses, day lilies, daisies, lilac bushes, lavender, wisteria, and many other flowering plants I couldn't name.

My mother loved flowers, and I loved my mother, so I had thought it would be a nice surprise to come home with a handful of flowers. She oohed and aahed so much over the little bouquet that I had to do it again and again.

The house was a minor detour on my way to school so I started making a habit of stopping by there to pick some flowers for my mother. This lasted maybe about a week until she asked the fateful question of where was I getting the flowers. I showed her.

I don't remember how long it took before I was able to sit comfortably on my duff. My mother almost never spanked me, usually a verbal reprimand and/or getting sent to my room was the usual punishment. A spanking from her meant I had committed something along the line of a mortal sin.

The lesson: it didn't matter that the homestead was abandoned. It didn't matter that the taking of the flowers didn't harm anything or anyone. What mattered was that they didn't belong to me in the first place, and I took them without consent.

I had stolen something, and the lame excuse that I gave (I didn't know) just didn't cut it for a good defense. Too bad I was just a kid and didn't have the savvy to hire a lawyer like Carlos Flores-Figueroa did. According to a recent Associated Press story, "Court rules for immigrant in ID theft case" (dated 04 May 2009), the Supreme Court decided that the identity theft of someone else's Social Security number that Flores-Figueroa had used wasn't really a crime because the guy didn't know that "the number belonged to a real person".

What country am I living in? I thought it was one where the fraudulent use of any Social Security number was a felony crime, that included using a number already assigned to a person (living or dead) or a made up number.

Imagine being in Amanda Bien's shoes when she got a letter from the IRS in February of last year, demanding $3000.00 in unpaid back taxes. These taxes were from five jobs in other states that she had never worked at.

The culprit was a 28-year old illegal alien who worked at a Taco Bell, a Wendy's, two different Target stores, and then at Engineered Air in Desoto, Kansas, where he was finally arrested. The person pretending to be Amanda Bien and using Amanda's SS number was Rocio Diaz Cano.

Then there was a teenager who applied for his first job. When he got his first paycheck, he found that part of his wages were being garnished for child support because someone else, some deadbeat dad, had been using his Social Security number.

According to Social Security about 75% of illegal aliens use fraudulent social security numbers in order to gain employment. In the state of Utah alone, one million children have their SS numbers used by illegal aliens.

Using a made up SS number that currently doesn't exist may not seem like an important issue but it is. Sooner or later such a number will be issued to a real person by the Social Security administration.

Imagine a child already having bad credit, a tax liability, and a work history and the kid hasn't even learned to walk yet. What happens later on when that child grows up into a teenager or a young adult and tries to buy his or her first car with a bad credit history already attached to the SS number? What happens when that person tries to get a job in today's world where employers check credit ratings and work histories of potential employees?

Social Security number identity theft is touted as being a "victimless crime", but is it really? And how bad can it get?

For Dublin, California resident Audra Schmierer her SS number was used by 200 illegal aliens, earning her a tax nightmare of a million dollars. Steve Millett had Abundio Perex steal his SS number with which Perez acquired 26 credit cards, a mortgage, and several car loans.

Linda Trevino applied for a job at a local Target store, but was turned down because, according to their records, someone with the same SS number was already working there. And the problem didn't stop there; she had to contend with bills and creditors that weren't hers.

The government wanted her to pay back the unemployment that she had collected while her SS number was working, and then there was the nightmare of the IRS wanting money for unpaid taxes on income she never had earned.

How bad can the problem be? According to immigrationcounters.com there are 22 plus million illegal aliens in this country (some other sources cite numbers as low as 12 million or as high as 30 million, but many sources agree that the estimates are grossly understated), and those who work the "over-the-table" jobs, requiring documentation for employment, commit the felony crime of ID fraud/theft.

It's estimated that nine to ten million people each year become victims of ID theft. The states that are hit the hardest are Arizona, California, and Texas.

In 2007, Arizona had a reported 293,500 victims of ID theft, costing $147 million dollars and 1.2 million hours to recover and repair. In Arizona, 19% of the victims of these ID thefts were children.

In California, in 2007, 1.5 million people fell victim to ID theft, and it had cost $749 million dollars and 6 million hours to recover and repair the damages. In Texas, in 2007, 880,400 individuals became victims to ID theft, costing 3.5 million hours and $435.7 million dollars to fix. Between 01 Jan 2002 to 31 Dec 2007, it was estimated that 20% of the population (64% of households) were hit with ID thefts.

In an immigration raid at a Smithfield Foods plant in the Bladen County town of Tar Heel, 86% of the arrested workers were found to have stolen identities. In a raid of a Tyson Foods plant, federal agents found one manager had requested roughly 500 illegal workers with photo IDs and Social Security cards.

To compound the problem, some Social Security numbers don't get stolen once and used, they get passed around families and neighborhoods, or sold over and over again. Some may consider a possible benefit to contributions to Social Security accounts; however, money from mismatched numbers and names goes into the Earnings Suspense File, and those whose names and SS numbers are stolen risk losing their Social Security benefits when the thief starts collecting them.

To be fair, illegal aliens aren't guilty of all the ID thefts that occur. Some are American citizens who steal the identities of other Americans, and there are even parents who steal the identities of their children in order to commit fraud, but the bulk of the problem is tied into our problem of illegal aliens.

The unanimous decision favoring Flores-Figueroa by the Supreme Court last Monday sets a precedent that'll worsen the problem. Identity theft is a felony crime which is punishable by five to thirty years of prison. A piece of legislature that was passed during the Bush administration had made mandatory the additional sentencing of two years to existing sentences of arrested and prosecuted illegal aliens. Now these felons have the golden opportunity of getting away with stealing someone's identity simply by claiming they didn't know the number they were using belonged to a real person.

Each and every one of those judges should be forced to resign their posts. What were they thinking? Certainly not about the welfare of the citizens of this country. Certainly not about the lives that get destroyed because some employers want cheap labor.

http://www.naplesnews.com/blogs/observa ... heftentry/

Sources:
"Report Indicates Illegal Immigration Contributes to ID Theft" (identitytheft.com)

"Illegal Immigration: Drugs, Gangs and Crime" by Dr. Jameson Taylor

"The secret list of ID theft victims" by Bob Sullivan

"A massive sweep at Swift meat-processing plants this week could lead officials to 'document rings'" by Faye Bowers, The Christian Science Monitor

"Illegal Immigration and Identity Theft Are Federal Crimes When Linked", ID Theft Victims Support Group of North America

"ID Theft Victims Get Overdue Attention" by Brenda Walker, VDare.com

"Identity theft linked to illegal immigration", azcentral.com

"Supreme Court: Feds Abusing Identity Theft Law" by David Kravets

"The high cost of illegal immigration" by Ronald Mortensen

"Court rules for immigrant in ID theft case", Associated Press

"Hidden cost of illegal immigration: ID theft" by Bob Sullivan

(THE IS ABOUT NORTH CAROLINA; PLEASE E-VERIFY EVERYONE AND STOP I-9'S ABUSE OF NOT HIRING NORTH CAROLINA CITIZENS!)

Smithfield joins program to curb hiring of illegal immigrants
Posted to: Business Virginia

By Philip Walzer
The Virginian-Pilot
© September 10, 2008
Smithfield Foods Inc., the subject of at least two immigration raids last year in North Carolina, was listed Tuesday among 37 new participants in a federal program to deter the employment of undocumented workers.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office named 26 new members and 11 new associate members to a voluntary program called IMAGE, or the ICE Mutual Agreement Between Government and Employers. The federal agency provides education and training to the companies, which in turn agree to deterrents such as establishing a tip line to report the employment of undocumented workers.
Smithfield Foods, based in Smithfield, is an associate member, which means it has not fulfilled all 10 requirements, ICE spokeswoman Pat Reilly said. Reilly and Dick Poulson, an executive vice president of Smithfield, declined to say which requirements the company had yet to satisfy.
Participation in the program, Poulson said, shows "we're being a good corporate citizen and complying with the federal law."
In 2007, immigration officials arrested about 50 workers and former employees at Smithfield's Tar Heel, N.C., plant. Federal agents said that they were in the country illegally and that some had engaged in identity theft.
"When the raids occurred," Poulson said, "we saw the writing on the wall.... We think we've taken steps to protect our employees by hopefully checking credentials and seeing that we're not vulnerable to people stealing identities."
Reilly said Smithfield, with more than 57,000 employees, was among the largest of the new additions to the program.
"We're thrilled that Smithfield wanted to be an IMAGE partner," she said. "It's an important industry. It's one in which we've found a lot of non compliance, not necessarily on the company level but in the hiring area, from the front-line supervisors looking the other way on an illegal work force. We hope that the IMAGE partners will become industry leaders."
The IMAGE program, launched in January 2007, now has 46 full members and associate members, Reilly said.
Philip Walzer, (757) 222-3864, phil.walzer@pilotonline.com
( i-9's is not fair playing ground for the North Carolina Workers!)

Related:
Senator Gordon Simth is not E-Verifying; I-9s?
http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-133378.html

Try the "I didn't know" routine with the IRS and see how far it gets you! It apparently works real well with the Supreme Court.

Try the "I didn't know" routine with the IRS and see how far it gets you! It apparently works real well with the Supreme Court.

Funny, coz when I was younger they used to have billboards that said "ignorance of the law is no excuse".....except now.....for certain people. Guarenteed the second I try to pull something off like that, it would fly like a rock.

An even more unnerving fact about this whole situation is that there are people out there... American citizens... who try to justify their misguided feelings that Illegal Aliens are paying taxes by saying that those Illegal Aliens pay taxes through other people's Social Security cards... and think nothing of it!

I once spoke to a person... a Minister of a church, no less... who insisted that Illegals are paying taxes. When I asked him how he thought that was possible, especially since they have no guest worker cards because they are in this country illegally, he told me plain and simply... "they use other people's Social Security cards!" Those were his words verbatim!

When I asked him if he was condoning identity theft so that Illegals could get away with what they are doing, he looked at me blankly, gave me the "silent 'Duh'" and walked away.

People like that just don't get it... or they think that if the taxes are paid anyway, no matter who pays them, then in their minds, the Illegals are paying the taxes! It's not the illegals who are paying taxes, but the people who are being victimized by them.

I am really beginning to think that America has a very serious brain drain going on.

Are we experiencing an attack of the Illegal Alien Body Snatchers? Are Americans going to sleep at night while pods that may have been planted by Illegal Aliens are taking over their minds? Really, I want to know why some Americans are so outright stupid!

I am really beginning to think that America has a very serious brain drain going on.

Cell phones....must have fried some important element in the brain. LOL Kidding.....but seriously, it's very demented thinking. Something has definately effected the mind of way to many people. I remember as a kid being sarcastic with stupid comments like they make, " and what does that have to do with price of tea in China?" because the rational has nothing to do with the proble. Paying taxes doesn't give anyone the right to do as they darn well please, neither does "hard worker who wants", neither does, "the children". It's like talking to the insane, because there's a definate mental block.

crazybird, IMO we should include "American first in this magnificent country" every time that we communicate with others re illegal aliens.

Right now we do a good job combating the pro-illegals nonsense, but IMO we'd be even more effective if we had our own rallying cry.

What a great post ELE. It just goes to show you that we aren't supposed to use a cop out when we should claim responsibility for our own actions. I'm tired of PC bullcrap that closes people's mind so much, that they can't see what they do.