Thursday, after concerns were raised about Social Security numbers being displayed in online copies of federal tax liens on file in Montrose County, the clerk’s office began removing all such images from its Web site.
“It is out there and I don’t like it,” Clerk and Recorder Fran Tipton Long said. “This has really become a hot issue. I have to safeguard the identity of our citizens.”
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These were available simply by performing a Montrose County records search online, Arkansas resident William Phillips told the Daily Press Thursday.
“Anyone can do this,” he said. “Don’t think you’re the first person to look up these documents. There’s no telling who already has.”
The Daily Press was also able to pull up Social Security numbers online.
“We have this problem in Little Rock, Arkansas, as well,” Phillips said. “I kind of stumbled across it just doing a search and realized there were thousands out there.”
Phillips said he was able to pull the SSNs of about 10 Arkansas politicians, including a senator’s, from his county’s Web site, and then alerted Pulaski County officials at a public meeting.
The clerk there agreed to redact the documents, but told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that the documents themselves should be available to the public.
“I’m still really concerned about our particular county,” Phillips said. “We still have a lot of records online that still have Social Security numbers. I’ve been trying to stay on that, rather than broadening the search, but I noticed your county.”
Within an hour of being contacted by the Daily Press, Long began removing the records from the county Web site — but stressed that, as public records, they are still available from her office upon request. Sensitive information will be redacted before hard copies of liens are made.
“We wanted most of our records out there for research. It’s the citizens’ records,” she said. “We have to let them come in and look at our records. But it’s not quite as accessible now.”
Long said she received several complaints over the last year and was already working on redacting the information.
“We’re trying to do it internally anyway. I don’t like it (the display of SSNs) whatsoever. I get a number of complaints.”
State law passed in 2006 prohibits a governmental entity from displaying in any way a person’s Social Security number. The problem, Long said, is that federal law trumps Colorado statute.
The Internal Revenue Service began redacting all but the last four digits of Social Security numbers from federal tax lien documents Jan. 6 of this year.
That does not address existing liens in online and other formats.
In an Aug. 15 letter sent to Long and other clerks, the IRS said liens are governed by the United States Code.
It is the secretary of the Treasury Department who controls the form and content of federal tax liens “notwithstanding any other provision of law regarding the form or content of lien.”
The IRS informed county clerks that while partial redaction of Social Security numbers didn’t change the content of a lien document, full redaction “is a prohibited change of our content, even if your statutes require it.”
Long said her office is working on completing the allowed partial redaction of the affected records, which is a time-consuming — and costly — undertaking. Software that can partly redact the information exists, but is expensive. Doing it all manually will require more staff and even more money in the long run.
Either way, the fix won’t be immediate. “There are so many records out there. It’s not an overnight fix, unfortunately,” Long said.
For now, she said, she’s keeping the records in hard-copy format only and manually redacting until the county is in the position to purchase the software.
Long said the clerk’s association is also working to change laws so that information like SSNs and birthdates are no longer part of what is publicly recorded.
“It never became an issue before identity theft,” Long said. “It wasn’t first and foremost on a lot of people’s minds.”
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