Taxing considerations

My first SuitWatch this month was on April Fools Day, and my second falls on Tax Day. Seems fitting, somehow.

If most of you are like me, you've put off your taxes to the last possible minute. Fortunately, even I'm not that much like me, so I had matters taken care of a month or two ago. That's why I have a guy who does taxes and a gal who does accounting, both of which are far worse at procrastination than I am.

Still, even in my exemplary case, stuff shows up at the last minute. Take yesterday, for example. That's when I'm writing this. Among other things, my accountant, who shares my small office space two days a month, found charges on my credit card bills for which there appeared to be no corresponding reality she could understand. Arriviung at understanding required my involvement. So I spent a lot of time on the phone and the Web researching the existence of mysterious products and services with names like HOSTA CORP 12 ROAM I PASS, HOSTLANE 01 OF 01, 2 and JCONNECT SERVICE.

Turns out they were all legitimate, and involved revolving charges that I either never intended to see revolve, or didn't want to revolve more than once. And all of them started revolving a year or two ago, and had been revolving in small dollar amounts ever since. Finding the "service" providers in each case was a bit of an ordeal, as was finding the logins and passwords required to access the online accounts I had set up with them back in the mists of time.

The oddest one involved the only company with a known "brand": T-Mobile. The charge was $137.30 for TMobile*HotSpot, Like the others, that's the name of the "Description" from the online statement. (Thank you, FirstUSA Bank, for making the statement easy to find, even if records only go back a couple months and offer no interesting research options, such as trending, side-by-side comparisons or spreadsheetable data forms.) When I went to the T-Mobile site (www.tmobile.com, naturally), I found nothing about HotSpot. The site seemed to assume that the company only had cell phone customers. Still, I thought my T-Mobile HotSpot login and password would work. But it didn't. Calls to the company by my accountant were fruitless. They didn't seem to know I existed. No phone number = No customer.

Eventually I found the HotSpot site, which wasn't visible to me on the main site because the graphic pointing to it failed to load in my browser. My login and password worked there, where I logged in and found both my $137.30 balance for last month, plus additoinal charges totaling $358.38. My credit limit, it shocked me to find, was $10,000, plus 1,000,000,000.00 minutes (both copied and pasted from the Account Management page). I had been paying around $21 per month for a long time, and assumed I had some kind of monthly deal. But no. Turns out I had a pay-as-you-go deal, and had been going a great deal, since I've been travelling a great deal, and T-Mobile's hot spots now included most Starbucks plus United's Red Carpet Clubs and various hotels where I had been staying.

Straightening things out involved a T-Mobile customer support person with a foreign accent (assumption: service is outsourced) so strong that the conversational packet loss rate was at least 50%. Eventually we got things straight; but two of the three mysterious providers listed above remain mysterious because we ran out of time.

So mystery is the theme here. The one I want to solve has to do with identity. On the supply side, I have reached the point where I have no problem with all the companies listed above "federating" details about my identity. This is what the Liberty Alliance and the WS-Federation (two agglomerations of industry heavies and allied companies) have been working on for some time. I have assurances from individuals involved that both groups (and various member companies) are doing their best to protect my privacy concerns, yada yada. I really don't care much about that. For the sake of argument, and market progress, I'll grant that they'll handle the concerns somehow. What I care about is on the demand side. There I want something that doesn't exist yet, and not many people are talking about, and that's an instrument of control for me, the customer (not "the consumer" which is a much weaker species of market life). I want something that lets me see and modify my relationships with providers of all kinds.

Maybe this something is provided by a new kind of company. Maybe its a set of definitions that allow such a service, and such a company, to exist.

What I want is an instrument of Mydentity, as I described it here ... http://www.searls.com/doc/didw2003keynote/source/2003didw_24.htm ... in my closing keynote to the Digital Identity World confereence last fall.

With it I can conrtrol all these Ourdentities that currently barely exist because they aren't real relationsihps. They're revolving bills.

Any takers? Or is it getting a little to taxing for me to keep harping on this thing?