Them's the ROOLS, sir!

Hat's off to REV CAN (CCRA) to being super-protective of your personal income tax information. I was trying to get a replacement PIN number for filing this year's return and decided to wing it through the phone operator.

That was an eye opener. I thought that a name, address, SIN and possibly the net income from the last return filed would suffice. After all I didn't want any real info, just a freakin' number with which I could provide them with more info. But, as Belushi used to say "WOOOOOOOH NOOOOOOOOOH!". The nice little dame on the phone wanted to check a few other things on last year's return as well, besides line 179, or whatever it was. Eventually she gave me a new number that worked.

But I'm thinking why all this horseballs? If some bozo wanted to cook up a spurious tax return for me, not only would he need to know a good deal about me, to contrive a lot of stuff that wouldn't check out(T4's, etc) and for what purpose? Or he would just bullshit from the get go. It would even be a good joke. I know now he probably wouldn't be able to get a PIN for e-filing and he'd just have to waste $1.05 mailing in an obviously phony paper return. Or maybe I'm being a little cavalier here, the mind that thought up the necessary levels of security, is just paranoid enough to treat a patently phony return as the real McCoy.

I could understand it if you wanted to find out how much tax Jean Chretien, say, paid last year. But then, I think government types should have this info publically accessible. That should apply to top level civil servants, senior Government employees and anyone involved in lobbying. However, given the CCRA bent for privacy protection, rest assured that your miserable income tax data is secure - and so is theirs.

Same sort of horsepoop at Crappy Tire. You can buy stuff without a credit card (the monthly bill will suffice), or you can pay on your account without a credit card, but you can't spend that funny-money that accrues for using your credit card without one.
Yep, the real cash blows through the system like a dose of salts, but the cyber 'funny money'? That's rigorously controlled, probably to stop some identity thievin' bastige from blowing your hard-earned $26.40 on a set of ginsu knives or a dandy flashlight.

It's sort of like the credit card companies that won't talk to the Bride - and she's the one who knows all about them.

Organization is a great thing, until some anal-retentive format freak gets to be in charge. 'Baffle them with bullshit' acquires a whole new meaning when paired with electronic media.