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Updated November 17th Related Posts Link to automotive form, business form

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The U.S. Senate passed legislation recently that would exempt certain businesses from complying with the Red Flags Rule.  Sponsored by Senator John Thune (R-SD), the bill (S. 3987) creates an exception to the Red Flags Rule for businesses that do not advance funds to a customer. The bill would, for example, redefine the term “creditor” as currently described under the Red Flags Rule guidelines, to apply only to those businesses who advance funds to, or on behalf of, a customer, and based upon an obligation to repay those advanced funds.  The legislation also still provides the Federal Trade Commission with authority to require certain organizations to comply with the Red Flags Rule. The legislation now moves to the U.S. House of Representatives, where the chamber must approve the bill before the end of the year in order for the bill to become law.  This may alleviate many businesses in industries such as law practices, healthcare providers (particularly solo practitioners), and perhaps some service providers in telecommunications and utilities.  However, it is likely that many businesses in the utilities space will still fall under Red Flags Rule enforcement given their accessing of consumer credit profiles in many of their application processing procedures.  Again, one has to wonder what the original intent of the Red Flags Rule was.  If it was to protect consumers from identity theft and other fraud schemes via a robust identity theft prevention program, then vastly narrowing the businesses under which potential enforcement applies seems counter-productive.  The advancement of funds or not doesn’t necessarily add to or reduce risk of fraud, as much as the actual obtainment of accounts and services with identity information…regardless of industry.  More to follow…

By: Margarita Lim Recently, the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that it will change how Social Security numbers (SSN) will be issued, with a move toward a random method of assigning SSNs. Social Security numbers are historically 9 digits in length, and are comprised of a three-digit number that represents a geographic area, a two-digit number referred to as a Group number and a four digit serial number.You can go to http://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomization.html to learn more about this procedural change, but in summary, the random assignment of SSNs will affect: • The geographic significance of the first three digits of the SSN because it will no longer uniquely represent specific states • The correlation of the Group number (the fourth and fifth digits of the SSN) to an issuance date range. What does this mean? It means that if you’re a business or agency that uses any type of authentication product in order to minimize fraud losses, one of the components used to verify a consumer’s identity – Social Security number, will no longer be validated with respect to state and date.   However, one of the main advantages of utilizing a risk-based approach to authentication is the reduction in over-reliance on one identity element validation result.  Validation of SSN issuance date and state, while useful in determining certain levels of risk, is but one of many attributes and conditions utilized in detailed results, robust analytics, and risk-based decisioning.  It can also be argued that the randomization of SSN issuance, while somewhat impacting the intelligence we can glean from a specific number, may also prove to be beneficial to consumer protection and the overall confidence in the SSN issuance process.

As the December 31st deadline approaches for FTC enforcement of the Red Flags Rule, we still seem quite a ways off from getting out from under the cloud of confusion and debate related to the definition of ‘creditor’ under the statutory provisions. For example, the Thune-Begich amendment to “amend the Fair Credit Reporting Act with respect to the applicability of identity theft guidelines to creditors” looks to greatly narrow the definition of creditor under the Rule, and therefore narrow the universe of businesses and institutions covered by the Red Flags Rule. The question remains, and will remain far past the December 31 enforcement deadline, as to how narrow the ‘creditor’ universe gets. Will this amendment be effective in excluding those types of entities generally not in the business of extending credit (such as physicians, lawyers, and other service providers) even if they do provide service in advance of payment collection or billing? Will this amendment exclude more broadly, for example ‘buy-here, pay-here’ auto dealers who don’t extend credit or furnish data to a credit reporting agency? Finally, is this the tip of an iceberg in which more entities opt out of the requirement for robust and effective identity theft prevention programs? So one has to ask if the original Red Flags Rule intent to “require many businesses and organizations to implement a written Identity Theft Prevention Program designed to detect the warning signs – or “red flags” – of identity theft in their day-to-day operations, take steps to prevent the crime, and mitigate the damage it inflicts” still holds true? Or is the idea of protecting consumer identities only a good one when it is convenient? It doesn’t appear to be linked with fraud risk as healthcare fraud, for example, is of major concern to most practitioners and service providers in that particular industry. Lastly, from an efficiency perspective, this debate would likely have been better timed at the drafting of the Red Flags Rule, and prior to the implementation of Red Flags programs across industries that may be ultimately excluded.