Yet another example of incompetnce and lies:

>Thank you for your interest in the waiting children of North Carolina. I apologize for the >inconvenience but we do not have a secured website, therefore we are unable to accept >homestudies by email. We want to make sure that we can safeguard families' confidential >information and comply with HIPAA regulations.

1st) The website is completely unrelated to email. Regardless of how secure your website is, email is still email and not secure.
2nd) HIPPA has exactly nothing to do with this.

So, in their intial interaction with us they have started off on the wrong foot by claiming BS reasons and incorrectly attributing it to law/policy. A much better way to handle it would be "We are sorry, but our policy does not allow us to accept home studies by e-mail at this time". Same effect, but without the BS.

Now, in all likelyhood, this person is just doing what they are told when asked about homestudies by e-mail. So, this is not against the individual, with the possible exception of speaking up about handing out BS answers. What happened was some manager somewhere wrote up the boilerplate email response using buzzwords and such thinking that nobody would actually call them out on it. It is even sadder that if we did, we would get moved to the bottom of the pile or the trash.

In the big picture, these are just other signs of how people operate at large. The world has become full of people who can't be bothered to give you factual infomation, just something to get you off their back so they can go back to their myspace browsing or whatever and not be bothered by this silly "job" thing that puts food on their table.