In Greeley, Colorado, on Oct. 17, Weld County Sheriff, John Cooke, seized thousands of confidential tax returns from Ms. Amalia Cerrillo's Translation and Tax Services office. For years thousands of Hispanics went to Amalia's for assistance in paying their annual income taxes. Although some of these people were in Greeley legally, others were not. The Sheriff and the District Attorney justified the raid on the basis that some of those taxpayers were illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, thus committing "identity theft."
Unfortunately, it appears that this "identity theft" operation is a thinly disquised attempt to deport illegal Hispanics, who according to the IRS "paid almost $50 billion in taxes from 1996 to 2003." (But we daily hear that illegals do not pay taxes. You're damned if don't, and now damned if you do!)
As serious as the immigration issues and racial overtones are, it is not the primary concern in this case. As Mark Silverstein, a legal director for the ACLU said: "If the sheriff and D.A. can comb through thousands of records in a tax preparer's office on the theory that some of their clients are doing something wrong, then none of our confidential information is safe."
This, if I may say so and I do, appears to be part of a popular law enforcement trend which sacrifices peoples' rights for the expediency of criminal investigation. The sheriff and D.A. don't want to do the old-fashioned police work of tracking down the identity-theft felons one at a time, they want to take a short-cut with no regard for the privacy of all the legal taxpayers.
One of the basic promises accompanying the Federal Income Tax legislation was that the information we citizens provided would never be used for anything other than federal tax administration. Do Sheriff Cooke and District Attorney Buck in Greeley Colorado have the authority to break that trust?
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