LANSING ? Michigan House Republicans on Tuesday unveiled a package of anti-identity theft bills aimed at making it harder for thieves to help themselves to goods bought with stolen credit cards or forged checks.

The proposed legislation would stop payment on stolen checks after the consumer attests to law enforcement that they were taken; would limit the amount of time a merchant can keep on file credit card information and would notify concerned people when credit has been opened in their names.

The laws are necessary, said Rep. Rick Baxter (R-Hanover), one of the bills’ sponsors, considering that identity theft, specifically with credit cards, is the fastest growing crime in the world, afflicting in the United States 11.8 million or 1 in 20 people as of 2003.

Baxter’s bill would aim to stop fraudulent spending in its tracks by creating a sort of “do not call list” for credit cards.

Consumers would add their names to the Office of Financial Insurance Services credit activity list, a quarterly report to consumer reporting agencies that would include the names of people would want to be notified when an account has been opened in their names.

This would help stop thieves from mounting charges on an account by alerting the consumer sooner, Baxter said.

A bill sponsored by Rep. John Pastor (R-Livonia) further protects credit account information by limiting the amount of time merchants can hold onto credit card numbers to four years.

There is no specified limit to how long that information is stored, Pastor said, and the longer the confidential data is on file, the higher the risk it could be stolen.

Creditors usually require merchants to hold onto records for a minimum of four years for dispute purposes.

The final bill, sponsored by Rep. David Farhat (R-Fruitport), would change the process for reporting when someone has written fraudulent checks from a person’s account.

The legislation “would take the burden of proof off the consumer” by allowing them to give a signed affidavit, provided by law enforcement, to the bank. The bank and law enforcement would then notify merchants of the fraud and that the checks wouldn’t be honored.

Right now, Farhat said, people have to wait and see where checks were written until they can prove forgery of their checks, in the meantime paying fees to stop payment on the checks if they want to forego paying for them.

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