In a recent InformationWeek article, journalist Thomas Claburn reported that the Identity Theft Task Force, a federal task force created by President George W. Bush to create solutions to fight identity theft, has issued several recommendations for combating identity theft. Among the task force’s proposed recommendations is offering free credit monitoring to identity theft victims. However, Jay Foley, executive director of the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center, disagrees with this recommendation, arguing that this service is of little help to identity theft victims.

According to Foley, the government deserves credit for moving in the right direction, but he is skeptical about the recommendation to consider extending free credit monitoring to victims. “At no time do I believe that free credit monitoring should be offered in a breach situation,” Foley says. “It’s nonsensical. It’s an unnecessary cost and expense. Credit monitoring is up to 70% accurate. It’s not effective enough to be viable.”

Foley believes that the government should instead focus its attention on policies and procedures for information redaction, since information that should not be published by government agencies continues to be posted online and elsewhere.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Credit Bureaus, Credit Card Fraud, Credit Freeze, Credit Report Monitoring, Equifax, Experian, Experian IPO, Financial Institutions, George W. Bush, Govermment Agencies, ID Theft Prevention, ID Theft Research Firms, Identity Theft Resource Center, Identity Theft Task Force, Jay Foley, Phishing, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, State ID Theft Laws, TransUnion, credit monitoring, identity verification, information redaction, wireless identity theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.