Do Your Employees Know How to Protect Themselves from Identity Theft?

The Federal Trade Commission estimates that as many as 9 million or 10 million Americans have their identities stolen each year. According to the National Crime Prevention Council, identity theft costs consumers $5 billion annually.

Clearly, identity theft is a serious problem nationwide. Although it does not affect the workplace directly, it could affect some of your workers. Maybe it already has. Providing awareness training for all employees is, therefore, a good and easy way to help employees protect their identity.

Training Objectives

Organize your training session around specific, actionable objectives. Ensure that when the training is complete, employees will be able to:

• Understand what identity theft is.
• Recognize its effects.
• Detect identity theft.
• Take effective action in the event of identity theft.
• Prevent identity theft.

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Training Requirements

Your identity theft training program should contain, at a minimum, the following elements:

• Basic explanation of identity theft
• Why trainees should be concerned about it
• How thieves access personal information
• What thieves can do with this information
• Signs of identity theft
• Information trainees should monitor regularly
• What to do in the event of identity theft
• How to prevent identity theft

Legal Overview

Give your employees a brief background on their legal protections against identity theft. Let them know that the U.S. Department of Justice prosecutes cases of identity theft and fraud under a variety of federal statutes. One of those is the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act passed by Congress in 1998. This legislation created a new offense of identity theft, which prohibits knowingly transferring or using, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit, or to aid or abet, any unlawful activity that constitutes a violation of federal law, or that constitutes a felony under any applicable state or local law.

This offense, in most circumstances, carries a maximum term of 15 years’ imprisonment, a fine, and criminal forfeiture of any personal property used or intended to be used to commit the offense.

Schemes to commit identity theft or fraud may also involve violations of other statutes, such as identification fraud, credit card fraud, computer fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, or financial institution fraud. Each of these federal offenses is a felony that carries substantial penalties—in some cases, as high as 30 years’ imprisonment, fines, and criminal forfeiture.

Federal prosecutors work with federal investigative agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U.S. Secret Service, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to prosecute identity theft and fraud cases.

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The material in today’s Advisor is adapted from a PowerPoint® session available in TrainingToday’s HR Library, “What You Need to Know About Identity Theft.”

In tomorrow’s Advisor, we’ll continue the discussion on identity theft, plus we’ll explore an exciting online resource of interactive training courses on dozens of key HR topics.