Foiling I.D. thieves: identity theft is on the rise, and states are looking for ways to secure their citizens' vital records.

• Author: Boulard, Garry

Every day in Des Moines, contract workers in the state Department of Public Health's Bureau of Health Statistics are involved in what seems to be an endless task: transferring more than 5 million birth, marriage and death records from old bound ledgers and microfilm into one computer file.

"We've done birth certificates going back to 1930 and death and marriage records going back to 1954," says Bureau Chief Jill France. "The initial data capture is now done, but we also have a good many issues still to resolve from handwritten records where the writing may have not been legible."

The extensive transfer has so far cost Iowa some $2 million. But it will allow law enforcement officials to go to one easy file to find information that had previously been scattered. "Only authorized personnel will have access to these records," says France. "They, in turn, are authorized to cooperate with law enforcement agencies in the conduct of their official duties."

PROTECTING CITIZENS' STATISTICS

In a different time, Iowa's move to centralize its vital records might have seemed like nothing more than an interesting, if unconventional, stab at bureaucratic streamlining.

But since the explosion in identity theft--reported incidents jumped 33 percent between 2002 and 2003--how state governments organize, archive and protect the vital records of their citizens has become a matter of abiding, if chilling, concern.

"It is a deadly serious problem," says Ken Beam, executive director of the National Association of Public Health Statistics and Information Systems. " In the world of identity theft, both birth and death records can be the breeder documents for so many other documents.

"But in state after state," he says, "personal identification information is very often spread out across many agencies. One agency handles voting records, another does the driver's licenses and still some other agency collects death certificates. And of course, there is no telling how often a person's Social Security number appears on some of these documents and is seen by the wrong people."

The diffused result, contend many experts, has unintentionally provided an opening for a wide variety of identity theft. "All you have to do is just get a little bit of information about someone from any one of these different agencies, and you would be amazed by how much trouble you can cause," says Jason King, a spokesman for the American Association of Motor Vehicles Administrators (AAMVA).

"Access to someone's driver's license, for example, leads to an amazing number of other opportunities in our society," he says, "such as obtaining financial and health services, and everything else from renting a car to cashing a check and boarding an airplane."

There are currently laws relating to the criminal enforcement of identity theft in all 50 states. But how each state compiles and permits access to the vital records that are so often used to fake an ID varies widely. At least 10 states, for example, are called "open records states," allowing access to birth and death records to anyone who asks for it.

"We are an open record state here in California. From an identification theft perspective that is both a good and bad thing," says Senator Debra Bowen, the author of several ID theft prevention hills and one of the nation's experts on how states can combat such theft.

"The good thing is that it makes it much easier for law enforcement to find out if a person was actually born on a certain date," says Bowen. "It you can get access to those kinds of certificates only if you are a relative, then that makes it difficult for officials to find out if someone is masquerading as a person who has actually passed away."

But the bad side is that such vital records are open to someone who wants to create mischief, "although identity theft in California has mostly come from other sources, such as copies of statements, stealing credit cards or making copies of credit card numbers," Bowen says.

GROWING PROBLEM

There's no doubt that identity theft is widespread, growing and varied. Credit card fraud accounted for 42 percent of all consumer complaints in 2003...