A Simple Plan to Make Moving Less Awful.

• Author: Highsmith, Brian

Missing mail can be disastrous. A permanent postal PIN would fix the problem.

Arlene and her two young children had recently been evicted from their Boston apartment. She had defaulted on her student loans and lacked sufficient savings to pay first and last months' rent on a new place. Her family was living in a shelter.

But Arlene (a client of one of my colleagues at the National Consumer Law Center; her name has been changed) was confident the situation would be only temporary. Between withholding and the Earned Income Tax Credit, she was expecting a check for nearly $7,000 at tax time--money she hoped would be her family's ticket back to a measure of stability. But when Arlene filed her taxes, she discovered that the government had seized her entire credit to offset her defaulted loans. The official notice had been sent to her old apartment; she never saw it. By the time Arlene consulted with a legal services attorney, it was too late to seek a waiver for financial hardship. A letter was missed, a lifeline lost.

Versions of Arlene's story play out every day across the country. Children lose public benefits when paperwork is mailed to their parents' old address. Predatory creditors win default judgments against alleged debtors who never see notice of their required court appearances. For undocumented immigrants, the consequence of missing a mailed court notice is typically an immediate order of deportation. Just last year, the Supreme Court ruled that states may purge citizens from their voting rolls if they fail to respond to mailed notices from election officials--an invitation that has been eagerly accepted by many states with long histories of voter suppression.

These horror stories, along with lesser hassles, all stem from a simple root cause: changing your address is a massive pain. Even in the digital era, crucial communications are sent by mail--addressed to fixed geographic locations, rather than directly to people, which is almost always the intention. After each move, our mailing system requires us to identify all the different people and offices who might ever want to send us mail--government agencies, friends and family, newspapers and magazines, banks and doctors--and then inform each of them about the change. When we leave someone off that list, or if they get the addresses confused, mail goes to our former residence. Although the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) offers mail forwarding, that service eventually expires and is...