Let me state up front that in writing this, I could have speculated all day and drawn many inferences. But instead, I have chosen to stick to the basic facts and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. For the record, I have injected my opinion once and I state that it is my opinion. And even though I have told this information to at least 500 people in person, one of whom was from Homeland Security and two others who worked for the IRS, I am still leary of posting this information for fear of reprisal. I have made a few attempts to contact the media, but there seems to be little interest from any media outlet. What is this information you ask? The information is that the IRS does not shred any of it’s print runs. They send ALL excess printed material intact to Great Lakes Recycling. To be fair, they might shred it now, but I have reason to suspect that it is still unshredded.
You see, I once worked at GLR. One day, they told me to go cut rolls (of paper). That day, I cut 20,000 pounds of paper from rolls. All rolls were from the same source: the IRS. Therein contained on the rolls was a four page letter to various addressees. I was so astonished at what I saw that I took pictures. (You can see them here, here, here, here, and here. The big roll on the pallet weighs well over 500 pounds.) It was hard for me to believe what I was seeing, that my information, your information, anyones information, was there just for the taking.
Question? How many four page letters does it take to make 20,000 pounds? Well, whatever the answer is, I had that many tax ID numbers and SSN run through my hands that day. Each letter contained alot of personal information: name, address, SSN, account information. But that is not the worst of it.
GLR has hundreds of migrant workers. Most are only around for a week or two, then they are gone. Most of them are supplied by a temporary agency called Staffing Network. There is, however, a core of about a dozen latin american workers who are always there.
Additionally, GLR makes runs to London, Canada twice a day for gigantic bales of recyclable trash. These trucks have border passes that allow them to go through the express border crossing checkpoint lane.
One day in the break room, I saw a guy looking at the snacks in a vending machine. What was curious to me was that it was quite obvious he wanted something from the machine, but he wasn’t quite sure what to do. Finally, one of the “permanent” workers saw him, told him something in Spanish, then ta da, it was like a light went on. What became obvious to me was that this guy had never seen a vending machine before and could not read English. Once he was filled in on how it worked, he put in some money, matched the letter and number to the corresponding buttons of his selection and made, IMO, his first ever vending machine purchase.
GLR also purchased another facility in Buffalo. About a year after the purchase of the Buffalo facility, I saw a news article somewhere (for the life of me I can’t find the link) that stated upstate NY and the Buffalo area had a quickly rising illegal immigrant population. I chuckled and thought to myself, “I wonder why?!”