Ken wrote:
Sure, but you wouldn't have been able to do any of that without some sort of verifiable ID that was checked by the bank at some point. You cannot bank in the US without some sort of legitimate verification of your identity due to anti-money laundering laws. Otherwise every drug dealer or tax cheat in the country would walk into a bank, open up an account with a fake name, and launder unlimited amounts of money without government supervision.
My own credit union serves members who don’t have social security cards nor photo ID, never have, and didn’t use one to open their accounts. It’s quite possible.
Banks and credit unions are required by law to verify the identity and, I think, address, of anyone who opens and account with them. If you are dealing with some small rural Menno-oriented affinity-based credit union that has other means of verifying someone's identity, and willing to do so, then that would be unusual and not what 99.9% of other financial institutions are going to require. They are still most certainly verifying the identity of every one of their account holders and documenting how their identity was verified if not by checking ID. Perhaps there is a signed affidavit by a bank employee verifying their identity or some such. But no bank or credit union can legally open an account for you without verification that you are who you say you are.
Ken,
You may want to stop and consider that some of these people have been members of the credit union for decades - a few of them might even be founding members.
And there's no requirement that someone have a photo ID or a social security card (or number).
As far as your education session about banking regulations, it's rather tiresome for those of us who (whether we like it or not) are stuck spending half of our workdays on Zoom meetings with financial institutions dealing with this thing and that thing to ensure greater regulatory compliance. Believe me, the main focus these days is not on checking people's IDs (which are easily faked anyway); preventing fraud and money laundering happens other ways, and it is a big, big priority for the customers I work with who have had to deal with big fines and oversight from regulators. I have yet to ever hear the topic brought of "We should be checking people's IDs more often."
Josh wrote:
My own credit union serves members who don’t have social security cards nor photo ID, never have, and didn’t use one to open their accounts. It’s quite possible.
Banks and credit unions are required by law to verify the identity and, I think, address, of anyone who opens and account with them. If you are dealing with some small rural Menno-oriented affinity-based credit union that has other means of verifying someone's identity, and willing to do so, then that would be unusual and not what 99.9% of other financial institutions are going to require. They are still most certainly verifying the identity of every one of their account holders and documenting how their identity was verified if not by checking ID. Perhaps there is a signed affidavit by a bank employee verifying their identity or some such. But no bank or credit union can legally open an account for you without verification that you are who you say you are.
Ken,
You may want to stop and consider that some of these people have been members of the credit union for decades - a few of them might even be founding members.
And there's no requirement that someone have a photo ID or a social security card (or number).
As far as your education session about banking regulations, it's rather tiresome for those of us who (whether we like it or not) are stuck spending half of our workdays on Zoom meetings with financial institutions dealing with this thing and that thing to ensure greater regulatory compliance. Believe me, the main focus these days is not on checking people's IDs (which are easily faked anyway); preventing fraud and money laundering happens other ways, and it is a big, big priority for the customers I work with who have had to deal with big fines and oversight from regulators. I have yet to ever hear the topic brought of "We should be checking people's IDs more often."
They do, however, need a taxpayer ID number if it is an interest bearing account.
I'm not sure how we got so far down this rabbit trail of IDs.
But my point remains. Countries with more competent administrative states than the US tend to do a better job of public administration. Whether it is tracking Covid, or managing elections, or running public health agencies. Or yes, administrating IDs and public records.
0 x
A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
Just a caveat with this chart - the CDC posts partial data as it comes is, so this chart tends to always tail off the latest three weeks or so until the confirmed data catches up. What I'm seeing from more currently compiled data is that the death rate, which has dropped, is currently plateauing a bit. Case rates have been rising again for about two weeks now, and death rates eventually follow case rates after about 3-4 weeks (it takes people a while to die of the disease). Look for hospitalizations to being rising this week, and deaths to begin rising again shortly thereafter. The question is will this be the beginning of a third wave as some models predict, and if so how high will the wave go.
Dan Z wrote:Just a caveat with this chart - the CDC posts partial data as it comes is, so this chart tends to always tail off the latest three weeks or so until the confirmed data catches up.
This is weighted with expected numbers for that already.
0 x
Try hard not to offend. Try harder not to be offended.
I think I am funnier than I really am.
Dan Z wrote:Just a caveat with this chart - the CDC posts partial data as it comes is, so this chart tends to always tail off the latest three weeks or so until the confirmed data catches up.
This is weighted with expected numbers for that already.
The science and data aren't matching the doom and gloom predictions, some of which I myself was making on this very forum back in March and April.
It's time to reopen things and go back to living life as normal. We're about to start having a lot of colds and flus, like we have every other season. Unless there's a new scientific consensus we need to eradicate the common cold and the flu, we need to get back to life as normal.
I expect the flu & colds to claim more lives this winter than coronavirus does, although I expect COVID-19 to be falsely blamed for the normal seasonal bump in flu deaths.
US deaths attributed to the virus are now over 210,000.
Daily new cases are stubbornly hanging in there around 40,000 per day but not increasing yet, although we're being warned that we're going to see an increase soon.
Daily new deaths are generally trending down but extremely slowly, in the 700s per day for the past week.
The dip and peak in both rates from a couple weeks ago now clearly seem to be associated with reporting delays from the Labor Day holiday.
Josh wrote:The science and data aren't matching the doom and gloom predictions, some of which I myself was making on this very forum back in March and April.
It's time to reopen things and go back to living life as normal. We're about to start having a lot of colds and flus, like we have every other season. Unless there's a new scientific consensus we need to eradicate the common cold and the flu, we need to get back to life as normal.
I expect the flu & colds to claim more lives this winter than coronavirus does, although I expect COVID-19 to be falsely blamed for the normal seasonal bump in flu deaths.
I think the disease has been pretty bad, but not catastrophic. Many people are living life as normal already. People who have basically gone back to normal, i.e. not wearing masks and gathering as groups, really are not seeing massive consequences for doing so in terms of getting the virus. There are these pockets of outbreaks but not large scale outbreaks. My county is in in rural PA and the virus has been here, six people have died from it in the whole time frame, but it just has not been anything like the cities. The cities, especially those which still have large sectors of the economy on lockdown, are experiencing financial devastation. In rural areas, the restaurant and tourism sectors are still suffering, and many of these businesses may not recover, but in general I don't think our economy has not been hit as badly as that of the cities. Many rural-based industries are booming. Construction for example is extremely busy. The RV business is wild. Food retailers are still seeing strong increases.
