So it went, month after month. When Pirozzi started receiving other people's 1099 tax forms in January, he sent an e-mail to several high-level officials at Walker Title explaining the situation and demanding that someone intervene to stop the torrent of misdirected mail. He got no response.
The e-mail, Pirozzi was later told, had been blocked by a company spam filter and no one at Walker had received it.
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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Pirozzi had not opened a single misdirected letter after the first one, and instead began dropping them back in the mail after scrawling on each envelope: "Return to sender. Please don't send me other people's banking information."
"It took me an hour every month," he said.
Deem said Wachovia had begun to correct customers' addresses as the returned envelopes piled up, but the full scale and source of the problem were not discovered until late last month.
Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said it would not be difficult for Wachovia to put safeguards in place to catch this kind of error before large numbers of statements get mailed to the wrong person.
"It should be rather obvious when a bank sends 20 statements to the same address that there's a problem," he said. "But small errors can be magnified when you're dealing with very large institutions. This is not your neighborhood bank."
Hoofnagle said that while he has not heard of a situation like Pirozzi's before, there have been other cases of small computer glitches having a big effect on the financial information of a specific set of consumers. Three years ago in Montgomery County, for instance, a mistake at Washington Mutual Mortgage Corp. resulted in tax payments not being correctly applied to 800 mortgagees' property taxes. Most homeowners learned of the problem only when they received county notices saying that they were behind on their property taxes and that their homes might be sold off. The county later sent out letters of apology and assurances that no one's home was on the auction block.
In Pirozzi's case, a large number of people at a condominium in Falls Church, the Broadway, were affected. Bob Butchko, president of the homeowners association, said residents received a discount if they used the developers' preferred choice, Walker, to close on their units. To secure a unit in the new building, prospective buyers placed deposits that were held in a Wachovia escrow account. Butchko said he doesn't recall receiving any correspondence from Wachovia once the account was established. "I didn't see anything from them," Butchko said.
Last month, his 1099 form reporting interest earned on the escrow account was delivered to Pirozzi's mailbox. Asked if he was angry about his information going to someone else, Butchko said, "That goes without saying."
He was not the only one. Pirozzi cannot believe the kind of documents that have been dumped in his mailbox month after month.
"Financial information is so private," he said. "Or, at least, it's supposed to be."
One day in mid-January, Pirozzi checked his mailbox expecting to turn up more of other people's mail. Sure enough, that was what he found. But mixed in was a strange sight: an envelope from Wachovia with his address and his name. It was his 1099.
"That was the first piece of correspondence we received from them that was actually for us," Pirozzi said.
Staff researchers Karl Evanzz and Carmen Chapin contributed to this report.
