Thursday 13 December 2012

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Since the federal moratorium on purchasing pilfered or questionable data—far from quality intelligence and doing far greater damage to German/Swiss relations, some constituent states are still engaging the bounty of opportunists and scorned employees for compact-disks whose authenticity and reconnaissance is never guaranteed. One of the latest dossiers is apparently little more than a screen-capture from a bank’s terminal, but it still fetched a high price.

Bavaria, among the other states, is a hold-out and so far has refrained from seeking out or taking up any offers that purpose to tattle on tax-avoiders—directly, least, but has allowed other authorities in some cases to extend their jurisdiction and have cooperated in investigations. While in America one’s identity is tethered to a social security number (though it was never intended to be a universal identifier and certainly not a better or more secure system) or the like, in Germany one is triangulated through name, residence and date of birth. In a case of mistaken and insisted identity from earlier in the year that was only very recently resolved (not identity-theft but rather identity-burden), a woman from a community in Bavaria with the very ubiquitous name of Kristin Muller was approached by out-of-state tax-agents (Bavaria had agreed to allow these agents to fight crime by proxy) who rifled through this housewife’s modest home and accused her of hoarding a half-million euro in Swiss institutions. The woman was aghast, naturally, but at quite a loss when it came to distinguishing herself from her sister-in-name, who remains unknown and at-large. When Muller tried to clear her record with the reporting bank, no one was able to confirm or deny whether Muller and Muller-Prime were the same individual or not, since this data list only contained names and account numbers, due to Swiss banking secrecy laws and even if the bank knew more, it was legally bound not to disclose it. What an awful mess to untangle for Frau Muller and other potential victims of circumstance, and I wonder if should could have claimed the balance of the deposit along with the liability the tax-agents insisted she owed. Perhaps Bavaria has been right in not pursuing what’s lauded as maverick justice and a way to level the playing field but in reality does not always deliver.