Earlier this week, one of my colleagues sat down at her computer to file her income tax return electronically using TurboTax. Twice, her return was rejected. The message she got back was startling: the IRS already had a tax return filed under her Social Security number.
How could this be? She hadn’t filed yet.
Panicked, she called the Social Security Administration to make sure her name matched her Social Security number. It did. Then she called the IRS. A representative pulled up the tax return filed under her name and Social Security number, and asked to verify the address. It wasn’t hers.
A thief had filed a fraudulent tax return under her name, and would likely get her $1,000 refund, not to mention her $600 economic stimulus payment. Thus began her tedious task of clearing her name: filing a police report, filing a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, putting a fraud alert on her credit report and mailing in her tax return with copies of her driver’s license, police report and other documents to prove her identity. (Read here for steps you should take if you’re a victim of identity theft).
Despite the growing problems, the audit found that the IRS doesn’t do enough to prevent the problem or prosecute those who commit these crimes. It found: “No action is taken to stop someone from continuing to commit employment-related identity theft using another person’s SSN and name. The IRS does not actively try to identify or stop an individual from committing identity theft.”
As we discussed in class the other night, there are some changes made to the homework this week. Please note the following:
The “PowerPoint Presentations” Excel case assignment on page 158 is no longer the homework required for Workshop 4.
The new homework due for Workshop 4 is the “Theme Park Admissions” practice exercise on p. 150. Please verify that you have completed all the steps before turning in the assignment, as there were two tables that we did not finish in class. Your completed assignment should have a column chart on one worksheet, a pie chart on another worksheet, and two stacked column charts on two more separate worksheets for a total of four worksheets within the spreadsheet.
If you wish, you may still complete the “PowerPoint Presentations” assignment and turn it in by the end of Workshop 5 for 100 points extra credit (an extra 10% of the final grade). Next week, I’ll have your grades printed off for you so that you can determine whether or not you want to do the extra credit.
If you have any other questions, feel free to ask me.
For nearly 30 years, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. employed a video-production company here to capture footage of its top executives, sometimes in unguarded moments. Two years ago, the retailing giant stopped using the tiny company.
At first, the decision threw Flagler Productions Inc. into a panic. Now it’s Wal-Mart that’s squirming.
In recent months, Flagler has opened its trove of some 15,000 Wal-Mart tapes to the outside world, with an eye toward selling clips. The material is proving irresistible to everyone from business historians and documentary filmmakers to plaintiffs lawyers and union organizers.
Among the revealing moments: A former executive vice president and board member challenges store managers in 2004 to continue his work opposing unionization. Male managers in drag lead thousands of co-workers in the company’s corporate cheer. In another meeting, managers mock foolish or dangerous use of a product sold in its stores. In 1991, founder Sam Walton describes Hillary Clinton, then a Wal-Mart director, as “one of us.”
The best part, maintains plaintiffs lawyer Gene P. Graham Jr., is that “Wal-Mart has no control over this stuff.”
Wal-Mart isn’t pleased. “It’s difficult to understand how the company could now sell to third parties the material we paid it to produce on our behalf,” says a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. “Needless to say, we did not pay Flagler Productions to tape internal meetings with this aftermarket in mind.” She adds that the company is “reviewing our legal options.”
So, remember… if you’re not sure you’re being taped, then pretend like you’re being taped and don’t do something you wouldn’t be caught doing. And, if you ARE being taped, then it’s probably not a good idea to dress up in drag.
Last week, a number of you mentioned that you were getting pop-ups in Excel that were annoying and preventing some of you from working in other cells. While looking for a web site that had tips for using Excel, I came across this article. This actually won’t get rid of the error most of you experienced, but if you’re getting a pop-up that has an “i” with a circle inside, that’s how you do it.
As far as the triangle with the exclamation mark that most of you were getting, the way to get rid of that is to go to the menu and select Tools and then Options. Click on the tab that says ErrorChecking, and remove the checkmark from the option that says Enable background error checking. That should fix that issue.
For more Excel tips, look at ExcelTip.com… there’s some things I didn’t look at out there about VB code and macros. I know a couple of people mentioned they were interested. See you all tonight!
The suit targets the company over images on its website, which allows users to find street-level photos by clicking on a map. To gather the photos, Google uses vehicles with mounted digital cameras to take pictures up and down the streets of major metropolitan areas. The Borings say the images of their home on the Google site had to be taken from their long driveway, labeled “Private Road,” and that violated their privacy.
“There’s no merit to this action,” Google spokesman Larry Yu said… He said Google has links on the website that let property owners request that such images be removed if they cite a good reason and can confirm they own the property depicted. Yu also said that if the Borings made such a request to Google, he is confident that the image would be removed.
At first, I thought this was a cash grab against the company, but they are really only asking for $25,000 in damages. So, here’s the question: how close is too close before it becomes uncomfortable that people are going to see your trampoline and your 3-car garage on the internet? Is Big Brother watching you? I suppose the only thing that would have made the story better was somebody in the picture sitting in a hot tub out back with a beer in their hand or something like that. Oh, wait… maybe it already happened.
I guess this might be a bit off-topic for the subject of data security this week, but one of the things I like to pursue in this class are how ethics apply to information technology. You’ve probably heard of this incident in the last couple of days where a young girl in Florida allegedly said some unkind things about her friends on MySpace, so her “friends” retaliated by videotaping themselves beating her into unconsciousness and threatening to post the beating on MySpace and YouTube.
Here’s another link to the story from NBC’s The Today Show. with other cyberbullying links in the article.
After reviewing the surveys that your class completed last week and observing the general direction that class went the other night, it seems that there are two sets of people in class: those who know Excel very well and those who don’t have any experience in Excel at all. That’s okay, because my hope is that we try to make class interesting for both groups of people. I will be asking those of you who do know Excel to come up in front of the class like Bryan did last week and helping me to lead the class on the screen.
I took a few moments over the weekend to review the textbook’s online resources made available by the publisher. Unfortunately, if you go to the web site listed on the back of your Exploring Excel 2003 textbook, you get an updated version written for the Office 2007 version.
However, there is a link off of that page to the previous Exploring Office 2003 web site. You will find a link to the Student Resources page, which I believe gives you a .ZIP file of all the Excel spreadsheets that are on the CD-ROM that came with your textbook. There are also some PowerPoint presentations on that page, which I won’t be using in class, but might be of some help to you.
I was asked over the weekend by a student whether or not it was okay to use your own laptops for ADM 316. Here is the response I gave:
If you’re running XP and Office 2003, then yes, you may use your own. If you’re running Vista, it probably won’t be that big of a deal, but if you have Office 2007, that is definitely out. When we do the in-class lab time, it will be too difficult for those who are not as computer literate to differentiate between the two.
As far as the laptops go, everyone in class will probably still get one unless arrangements are made first with the university, and they will still be responsible for their care, regardless of whether they bring them to class or use them in class or not. In Indy, they are generally delivered on-site, but they are couriered to the online students, so I don’t know how you will receive yours. This is the first time I’ve taught this course off-site.
I have Office 2007 on my personal laptop, so when it comes to in-class lab time, I’m thinking about having one of the students running the overhead as a demonstration. When I teach this on-site, I generally check a laptop out of inventory.
