I am CEO of a company based in Oregon (www.IDTELi.com) and I AMAZED at how many company are reluctant to provide formal ID theft education to their employees.

We hear more often from companies, unless the LAW specially mandates they provide prevention education, it is not something they feel needs to be high on their business priority list. This is wrong thinking! As we hear everyday in the news,the costs associated with responding to thefts and breaches is FAR more financially impactful to their bottom-line and their business name than providing effective security and ID theft prevention education.

The government is becoming less tolerant of businesses being reckless with customer information and we'll see more and more sanctions and penalties imposed going forward.

I'm also amazed at how many businesses do not want government telling them what to do, yet they are not willing to educate the very people who handle all sorts of sensitive employee and customer information UNLESS there is a law that forces them to do so.

Some even feel offering free 'lunch and learns' or sending out e-mails and newletters is adequate. Yet when you ask how they validate information retention, they grow silent.

I'm saddened to see business executives responding like children WRT government... in that they will only do what the government mandates. Shouldn't they show more concern for their employees and customer sensitive information regardless of the costs?

I often wonder about the Boards and Executive teams of so many companies here and abroad. They run around talking about the problem yet it takes an Act of Congress to get them to entertain developing effective identity theft education and sound security processes and procedures. This should be a critical part of doing business.

Too many are focused on investing tens of thousands of dollars in the hope of generating revenue and fail to recognize how much of that revenue will be eroded in legal fees, fines, penalities and civil lawsuits by not making prevention a business priority.

IDTEL is founded on the principle we need to "Educate to Mitigate." And until companies small and large adopt a similar philosophy, we can expect to hear daily about preventable ID thefts and data breaches.

Lets just get rid of the Internet.