One would think that stopping someone else’s personal information being constantly sent to you would be an easy thing to fix. Worryingly my recent experience has disproved this hypothesis.

Last year I started receiving letters at my home addressed to somebody who doesn’t live here. These are invoices and notices from a well-known toll road company in Victoria which I receive every few days.

This sort of thing does happen occasionally – I think to everyone – and certainly isn’t my first experience with an incorrect addressee. What makes this situation different is that it is so frequent and annoying.

I have constantly returned these to the sender; in this case the toll road company. But this has had no effect whatsoever and the invoices and notices keep coming.

After months of this I decided to try to get these stopped once and for all. I called the toll road company and was politely but firmly told that there was nothing that they could do. This surprised me given that the letters were sent by this company. According to the Customer Service staff these letters are sent automatically based on registration information sent to them by VicRoads and there is no way for them to change it.

My next call was to VicRoads as per the suggestion from the toll road company. After two more switchboards I was also told there was nothing they could do because of unspecified privacy rules. When pressed the person I spoke to told me to visit a VicRoads Service Centre in person with the physical letter and evidence that I live at the address. This would allow them to delete the address from the vehicle’s registration.

Since VicRoads closed down some of these Service Centres my nearest one is quite a distance to travel. Nevertheless I made the trek to my closest office as I was told.

To my chagrin they were not able to help me, despite doing exactly as I was instructed. They did try to seek advice from someone else in the office but to no avail. Their only advice was to call the toll road company, which of course I had already done. So it was a completely wasted trip.

I called VicRoads once again later in the day and re-explained all of the above. They repeated their first advice that there was nothing they could do, as did the toll road company who I also subsequently called.

So with my options exhausted I am now resigned to having these piles of letters continue to fill my letterbox and generate work for Australia Post.

To me it’s incredible that two large organisations can constantly send out someone’s personal information, even when they know that this is to the wrong person. Were I less scrupulous I don’t think it would be too difficult to steal someone’s identity using this kind of information, which includes their vehicle registration, exact dates and times of travel, and full name.

I understand and applaud that organisations must protect personal information that they store but surely this also extends to not distributing said information to unknown people?

I can’t help but feel that Franz Kafka would have made some good mileage out of this scenario.