"They're putting all of these people at risk," Givens said. "The person on the receiving end here was honest. But he might not have been."
Pat Derwinski shudders at the thought.
Homeowners association president Bob Butchko was angered when Falls Church condominium residents' tax forms containing private information were sent to someone in Minnesota because of a clerical error. The problem was uncorrected for nine months.
(Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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Derwinski, a real estate agent who lives in McLean, was among those whose 1099 form, a document that lists her Social Security number, showed up last month in Pirozzi's mailbox. "It is very, very scary," she said. "I've had a couple of clients in the past year go through identity theft. It's a horrifying situation."
Derwinski and Pirozzi have never met. But they do have one thing in common: They both bought condominiums in Northern Virginia last year, and they both had Wachovia escrow accounts after using Walker to handle the closing.
Pirozzi, 30, an Air Force veteran, and his wife bought a unit at the Continental in Ballston but quickly sold it after he took a job in Minnesota as a financial analyst with a national retailer last spring. With the sale complete, Pirozzi thought he had put the whole thing behind him.
Then one day soon after the move he checked his mail and found a bank statement from Wachovia. He opened it and was puzzled to find information on an account that was not his own. "I looked, and it wasn't my name. But it was my address," he said.
Pirozzi thought maybe the name was that of one of his new home's previous owners. But as he began sorting through the rest of his mail that day, he said he "noticed a consistent theme."
That first month, he said, he received several dozen statements that all listed his address but someone else's name. Pirozzi first called Wachovia, hoping they could quickly resolve the matter and get the mail redirected to its rightful owners.
Instead, he got bounced from person to person, number to number, automated system to automated system.
Eventually, he talked to someone who claimed to have an answer. "They said it was all Walker's fault," he recounted. "I talked to Walker, and they said it was all Wachovia's fault."
