A couple years ago my 80-year-old father received a slew of Victoria’s Secret charges on his credit card. He was able to get it straightened out, but said something along the lines of “it’s amazing what these idiots do–they could’ve caused somebody a divorce with an error like that.”
No surprise–a North Dakota child support enforcement agency just did a similar thing. According to this recent Bismarck Tribune story, “A Chicago man says he was shocked to find out a North Dakota child support agency had notified his boss that it was looking for information about him in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.
“Edward Jackson…learned from his employer earlier this week that he had been named by a woman in North Dakota as the father of her daughter…His employer…got a three-page questionnaire from the Lake Region Child Support Enforcement Unit…
“Jackson said having his boss hear from North Dakota officials was embarrassing. He also had to tell his wife of five years.
“When I sat down and told her, she at first thought I had a kid from before we were married and I didn’t know about it,” he said. After they looked at the dates involved, it was clear to his wife that ‘something was messed up,’ he said.”
He was able to convince his wife they had the wrong man and get child support agency to get it straightened out. Turned out–imagine that–they had the wrong “Ed Jackson.” We’ll see if the correction holds or, as so often happens, their computer systems make the error over and over again.