One area that has not received much coverage is the prosecution of identity theft crimes. Last week, Rita M. Glavin, Acting Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, Department of Justice, testified at House Homeland Security Committee hearing on PCI standards. Assistant Attorney General Glavin cited some very sobering statistics: there are more than 2,000 active cases related to identity theft pending in the U.S. Attorney’s Offices. She said there has been a 138.2 percent increase in identity theft convictions between 2004 and 2008.

The federal stats made me wonder about the number of state and local prosecutions. Conventional wisdom is that the federal prosecutions are the just the tip of the iceberg. U. S. Attorneys all over the country apply standards including big dollar losses, lots of victims, and “winability” to filter out any where from 50 percent to 90 percent of the cases in order to make the most of their limited resources.

So, how many state prosecutions for identity theft are there? Individual states publish data but I couldn’t find a compilation of state prosecutions. Is there one out there?

Does it matter? Well, there’s a sense that identity theft is a crime that isn’t punished. Maybe that’s why only about one-third of identity theft victims file a police report according to a recent report by Javelin Strategy & Research. Would more consumers file a police report if they thought the crook was likely to be prosecuted? Hard to know but I bet they would.

So, the question is…where is the data about state prosecutions? If you can point us to other resources, we would greatly appreciate it.