The O-Factor

It’s simple. Because I can’t.

Tax day is coming up, and just a few weeks ago, I received a postcard in the mail from the IRS that extolled the virtues and benefits of filing one’s tax returns electronically. Faster refunds, saving postage, less paper, all is well. There’s no doubt in my mind that postcards were targeted mailings–sent to those taxpayers that haven’t filed electronically in the past because sending it out to everyone would simply be redundant, as well as a waste of time and money. But then again, this IS the government we’re talking about, so I’m sure anything goes.

When I filed my taxes last year, I used TurboTax for the first-time and it was a relatively simple and straightfoward process. Once I got to the end of TurboTax’s wizard, I had the option to e-file with the IRS for free. I figured that I had nothing to lose. With no worries about mail being lost, in addition to getting my refund faster, all for free, who wouldn’t want to E-File?

When I submitted the filing via TurboTax, it was immediately rejected because my last name is a single character, “O”. What does this mean? It means that I had to print out the return and send it through snailmail. Grand.

This is just one of the many examples and headaches that I, along with my family have been dealing with since my parents emigrated to the States in the late 70s, but we’ve learned to deal with it. Our family’s last name is accurately represented by a single English letter and I believe it’s an appropriate way of romanizing it. In Korea, our last name is pronounced “Oh” just like one would pronounce the English letter “O”. Now based on some sleuthing I’ve done on the Interweb, I’ve found that there also different variations of the last name spelling, which I believe is the case because the head of a household who moves to another country most likely has sole discretion in how they want the last name to be spelled in English. So if you look through a phonebook, you’ll probably see “O”, “Oh”, “Oo”, “Oe” and whatever other awful permutations of the name there can be.

But life goes on, albeit with such annoyances.

The problem isn’t solely exclusive to the IRS or any particular authority. Rather, it can mostly be attributed to an industry standards-based set of database validation constraints that were created decades ago that states that a last name will, at the very least, be two characters in length. And while 99% of the population would be able to meet those constraints, the remaining 1/10th of 1% would have trouble meeting them. The majority of organizations adopt such standards in order to provide a degree of data uniformity and I suppose it’s architected in such a way to prevent the input and submission of people with fictitious and frivolous last names.

It’s really amusing when receiving a letter in the mail, where it’s addressed in the form of last name followed by first name. Again this probably occurs when dealing with a customer service representative and they simply can’t move forward on their form-based interfaces because the last name is too short and unacceptable. They will then try to get around it either be adding letters to my last name or by simply switching the name fields around so that the first name is the LAST name and the FIRST name is the last. One would think that a similar limitation exists for both first and last name fields, but that’s simply not the case. So while it is not acceptable to have a full first name and a single character last name, a person could have a single letter first name and a full last name and that’s how some companies reformat my name. Ugh.

But the problem is systemic and such things can’t be fixed overnight. I’m not sure how effective it would be to contact every bank, credit card company, and merchant I deal with and tell them that they have to drop the validation constraints on the last name field within the customer table of their database. As a plain old customer I don’t think I can really ask to be forwarded to the company’s developers or tech support group seeking help. In order for this problem to go away, the entire industry would have to adopt the systematic removal of this constraint from all of their databases.

But since my last name is already mangled up in the computer systems, I at least have the benefit of having partial security through obscurity against identity fraud.

P.S. - Sidenote of the week is to save time checking for website updates by using an RSS reader.  Yes I’m finally using one after I realized how repetitive and unnecessary it was to manually and arbitrarily check my favorite websites.  Forget about using these RSS apps that you have to buy that run on your computer.  Just use Google Reader and start adding the sites you like into it.  Then just leave the window running in the background or minimized and when you want to check for updates just open up the window and all the information is there for you.  It’s a little buggy, but since it’s free, it’s a steal!