Apparently I don't exist...?

Question

Last summer I signed up for a volunteer post with a company called vitalise which gives holidays for disabled people. I had to give id to prove that I wasn't a molestor or something. I sent my passport and driving license as id and they accepted that. I then went to the place and worked there for three days when I was called up to the office to explain a problem. Apparently they had difficulty finding me on some computer program. They thought I had stolen someone's identity or something as apparently my name doesn't exist. I explained that I was adopted and that I originally had a birthname. I didn't mention this to them before as I only kept that name for one day of my life. They looked up my birthname and yes all the details were there: date and place of birth (which I didn't know until then). I then had to go through yet another check with more documents to prove that I was actually this person. What a lot of palaver! Does anyone else whose adopted ever have this problem?

Answer 1

My parents adopted my brothers when I was almost 4-years-old.  They began claiming them as dependents on their tax returns at that time.  All normal and good, right?  

Then, the year I was 17, my parents got a nasty note from the IRS saying they had tried to claim invalid dependents on their return!  It was the first year I had a real W-2 to file, so my parents thought maybe I was the problem, but it wasn't me!!!  When they FINALLY got an interview with the IRS to discuss the problem, it turned out that the IRS had invalidated their return because my brothers' last names didn't match the last names associated with their Social Security numbers.  This was THRITEEN YEARS after their original adoption - THIRTEEN YEARS after they'd been issued new birth certificates, and the change had been registered with social security - and the THIRTEENTH tax return that had been filed, the previous 12 having gone through without difficulty.  Apparently that year the IRS had implemented some new computer tracking stuff, and all the databases didn't quite link up right.  It was crazy!  

However, it's not only adoptees who are having these problems.  In 2002, a coworker I had was going to take a second honeymoon with her husband and needed to go get a passport.  She got rejected because her Drivers License and military IDs didn't match her original birth certificate.  He whole life she had thought her name was "Lisa", but it turns out that for some reason her original birth certificate said her name was "Liza".  She thinks this is because her mother didn't read English at the time she was born, so a social worker misunderstood what her mother wanted to put down.  It was nuts that she'd gone through more than 30 years of life with the "wrong name".  It ended up just being easier for her to legally change her name than to try to go back to being "Liza".

Answer 2

I am listed as "now dead" on an official document.  Although, thank goodness, it has never been a problem for me.

Answer 3

no but i did run into a problem with trying to get a passport. they kept sending me a void birth certificate instead of my created one. took me almost 4 months to get the right one all because i requested my real one once. makes you wonder how bad the system is broken down. i have some friends that can't get a passport cause they aren't even sure where they were born. how sad is that?

Answer 4

Currently, many adoptees are finding it difficult to get passports.  A lot of us, like myself, have "birth" certificates that were filed over a year after our births.  These are the amended certificates that we get following the finalization of our adoptions.  The long period between birth and filing is considered suspect.  There's a lot of rigmarole for adopted persons to go through to do something as simple as get a passport now.

Some have had problems getting driver's licenses for the same reason.

EDIT:

BTW, Gershom is right.  Get ANY and ALL information you can BEFORE anything gets changed.  Otherwise, you may NEVER get another chance to get this information.  Even if you don't think it's important now, you may very, very well feel differently later.  Do it just in case!!

Answer 5

What you have to do is contact the background check company and ask what you have to do to link your birthname to the rest of your life.   This is roughly equivalent to the name change activities that millions of women do each year when they get married and others do when they get divorced.  Some of it should have been done when you were adopted.

Answer 6

no!! They will seal it, ,they will seal it all away from you. GET YOUR INFORMATION BEFORE YOU CONTACT THEM AND HAVE THEM SEAL IT. I mean it, this could be your only chance to have the names of the people you come from.

Answer 7

I am not adopted, but have similar issues. I was the firstborn of twin girls. My twin sister died shortly after birth. Somehow the SSA mixed up our birth certificates and stamped MY birth certificate-DIED XX-XX-1977. My mother got my dead sisters birth certificate but never got mine. She wrote to the SSA to get a copy. Finally after 3 months she gets my birth certificate, only to see it has my "death" date stamped on top. It takes another 3 months to get it straightened out. My birth certificate still says I'm dead(they wont change it or issue a new one) I have to explain the whole mess to people when I have to use my birth certificate for anything.