THE tax authorities have been detecting an average of five incidents per month, of persons who try to register as taxpayers with stolen identities, and both the police Fraud Squad and the Taxpayer Registration Centre confirm a rise in identity theft.

Ricardo Campbell, registration manager at the Taxpayer Registration Centre (TRC), said his office was seeing as many as 60 cases annually of persons applying for Taypayer Registration Numbers in the names of others.

“We deal with those types of cases maybe four, five times a month for the last four years,” said Campbell.

The Fraud Squad said his unit is probing several cases falsely obtained passports and driver’s licences, adding that offenders usually acquire these official documents with the help of stolen or phony birth certificates and photographs, certified with other persons’ names.

But, not all cases involve identity theft, said Superintendent Errol Samuels, head of the squad.

“Some people will sell their birth certificates to help somebody to get a TRN or passport,” said Samuels.

“We have one or two cases like that over the years… We have made arrests but I wouldn’t say the problem is prevalent.”

The victims of identity theft tend to face hurdles to prove they are the victims and not the perpetrators as one St Catherine woman found out recently.

“I want someone to pay, both in money and time in prison if possible,” said the 26-year-old woman who alleges that her birth certificate

was ‘borrowed’ from her home in November 2003 and used to apply for a passport, TRN and driver’s licence in her name.

She only found out about it when she applied for a TRN in March 2004, and was told that she had already received the card two months earlier.

The Fraud Squad was called in to investigate, and were able to determine, said the woman, that the alleged perpetrator’s fiancee was someone she knew for many years.

She surmised that he obtained her birth certificate by ‘borrowing’ it from one of her relatives.

“I am thinking that at any point the police can come and lock me up and say I did something. If I should go somewhere and get arrested and they say ‘I see your name and it’s you’, it’s going to be difficult for me to prove who I really am,” she told the Sunday Observer.

“I went to the passport office and was told that I could not get a passport

because this person has one already; I cannot leave the country as I wanted to,” she cried.

The passport office has since placed a stop order on the ‘bogus’ owner of the passport, and the fiancee of the woman now holding the documents is facing charges of conspiracy to commit fraud.

The case comes up for trial in the Half Way Tree court tomorrow, January 9.

Government policy requires that all persons transacting business with its agencies and departments, no matter how mundane, must produce a TRN. It widened the net with even more stipulations that to acquire social benefits such as health insurance require the production of a taxpayer number.

To legally register, Campbell says the applicant may use either a valid passport or driver’s licence, or may present in person, a birth certificate with a certified photograph, that is, one endorsed on the back by a Justice of the Peace, a school principal, a Superintendent of Police, a medical doctor, an attorney or a minister of religion, as a true representation of the applicant.

“A passport or driver’s licence can be used on their own, but all other IDs must come with the birth certificate. This includes the national ID or a company ID,” said Campbell.

The TRC tends to detect the fraud only after a legitimate person applies for a TRN.

“The only way we have an indication that something is wrong is when we enter that information on the system and it picks up a match that shows this person has a TRN already,” said Campbell.

“In that case, we try to verify whether it is the correct person who applied first, or is trying to apply now.”

The manager attributed the increase in persons trying to get TRN illegally to the growing importance of having the identification.

“… More agencies are asking for the TRN than before. The more agencies require TRN, the more people apply for it,” said Campbell.

Applications can be made at any of 28 tax collectorates islandwide.

There are approximately 1.5 million numbers in the TRN database, which was created on April 1, 1996.

Asked why the TRC does not do more detailed investigation to ensure that TRN applicants are genuine, Campbell said the centre made it relatively easy to obtain a TRN in order to encourage persons to pay their taxes.

Campbell said the ‘fraudsters’ were mainly young people, with “slightly more men than women, but pretty close between the two genders.”

editorial@jamaicaobserver.com