July 26, 2001 Good morning Mr. Chairman, my name is Michael J. Zabko. I am formerly the executive director of the TREA Senior Citizens League (hereinafter referred to as TSCL), a 501(c)(4) non profit organization, incorporated in Colorado with offices in Alexandria Virginia. I am no longer serving in the capacity of Executive Director of TSCL, and while I willingly cooperate with this inquiry, I am certain that your best information will come from TSCL itself. Therefore, I am accompanied by my personal Counsel, Hon. Mark A. Fury.

I am here in response to your subpoena to discuss issues regarding the actions of the Senior Citizens Leagues with regard to two sets of flyers made by parties unknown to us. These flyers misstated our position regarding the Notch Issue for Social Security recipients born between 1917 and 1926, and fabricated a position on Slave Reparations that TSCL has never even spoken on.

As executive director of TSCL I first became aware of the existence of the flyers as result of a fax from Tim Kelly of the Social Security Administration, received at our offices on Jan. 13, 2000. The fax is a copy of a flyer advising seniors of the Notch issue, and requesting Social Security numbers in addition to other information which would make the respondent a member of a national register for notch victims. For reasons that I still am not aware of, the makers of the flyer used a variation on the TSCL name, and directed the responses to TSCL's post office box, presumably to give their flyer credibility.

I responded to Mr. Kelley by letter dated January 18, 2000 denying TSCL knowledge of or involvement in the production of the flyers and subsequently I instituted efforts to ascertain who was behind these printings. In every case TSCL made every effort to establish that TSCL had no involvement in the production of or distribution of these fliers and made numerous efforts to inform the public of our lack of involvement.

These efforts included contacting the Postmaster General's office, the Better Business Bureau, and responding to additional requests for information from the SSA Inspector General's office and the office of the state Attorney General of Arkansas. In addition to sending a letter to everyone who tried to contact us as result of the original Flyers, TSCL put up information denying involvement in them on our web site. I personally appeared on local TV and radio public interest and news programs, and reached out to the AG's offices of states in which we do business in an attempt to set the record straight.

By August of 2000 at least three state or federal agencies were actively investigating this issue and had contacted us for further information about these fliers which include the offices of Representative Bono, Social Security Administration's IG's office, Arkansas AG's office and Postmaster general's office.

As near as we can determine, and as confirmed by the subsequent investigation of the SSA IG's office recently completed, the fliers were produced by some party other than TSCL for purposes that are still not clear. The resulting influx of mail in response to the flyers did contain name, address, telephone numbers and other personal information of the respondents to the false flyers, which we directed our commercial mailing house to sequester under lock and key until such time as either the Postmaster General or the SSA could be contacted.

The sequestered information was inspected by both agencies, and ultimately turned over to the SSA, after meetings with SSA Inspector Stubbs and representatives of the Postmaster General. It was also concluded in those meetings that the right course of action was to get a letter to each of the 29,000 respondents denying our involvement in the potentially fraudulent information, advising them of our interest in their protecting their personal information, and including a copy of legitimate TSCL brochures so that they would know the difference.

At Mr. Stubbs' advice, we removed a line from that letter pointing out the difficulty we were having making the various governmental entities understand that we are the good guys in this affair. Having discussed this mailing with and shown it to representatives of all federal agencies by which we had been contacted at that time, I must confess that I am somewhat surprised to be here today responding to your subpoena about including proper TSCL information in the mailing.

While under my direction TSCL made every effort to keep the government agencies informed and to solicit their input on how best to proceed to clarify this problem. TSCL had, at the time of my departure in February of this year, 1.3 Million members, who contribute on average $1O per year. Its books are audited annually by Johnson & Lambert CPA, and has been audited by Ernst & Young. TSCL had no need for engaging in fraudulent activity to increase its membership or improve its finances. Our sole goal was the protection of the interests of senior citizens, and I, for one, stand with the Committee in its attempts to identify the wrongful activities of a few, and eliminate them.