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Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard was at the University of Arizona Friday to promote his new Consumer Guide for Young Adults.

The guide is a 27-page booklet with tips to guide people in their late teens and early 20s through first-time financial decisions such as buying cars, applying for credit cards and signing leases. It's available on the attorney general's Web site, azag.gov.

Here are excerpts from an interview with Goddard, whose office handles thousands of consumer complaints each year.

A: There are serious mistakes that you can make early on in your career as a consumer that can hurt your credit for a long, long time and we're trying to make sure that people don't fall in those traps.

This was one that took a while in production because most of our awareness of consumer victims had to do with seniors. And frankly a great deal of our consumer protection efforts are protection for seniors. There was a perception that university students in particular were less likely to be victims. A, they had less resources. B, they were very smart and on top of the game and so the con artists wouldn't go after them. And we found that was wrong.

Q Identity theft has been a high priority for a while now. Where is that on this year's agenda? Still as important, more important, getting better?

A Certainly as important. We're finding that identity thieves are perfecting their skill. They're finding new and more subtle ways to approach victims.

And we have another piece of material that's on our Web site, too, and that's our identity theft repair kit. I think it's the best thing out there right now. There are lots of different ways, lots of information that is designed to help you avoid identity theft or fix it if you're a victim. We tried to make this the simplest and most direct of all the ones that are available.

A I haven't. I can say that a big part of our ranking as an identity theft area of lots of victims is because of employer fraud. Under the FTC's data collection they have one category which consists of people who use other people's Social Security numbers when they're employed. This is not identity theft in the way I'm normally talking about it because the thing I'm most concerned about is the crime of taking somebody else's identity to take money from them.

When you use a Social Security number and get a job, you're actually paying into somebody else's retirement account, you're paying into their Social Security number. And you're never going to get that money back. Certainly it's an improper use of a Social Security number, but it's not for the intent of taking somebody else's money. So I have a hard time thinking of it as the same crime.

But for the purposes of reporting, it's considered the same crime. We're three times the national average in that category. That's the thing that catapults Arizona into first place. It's still too high. I don't want to excuse the situation.

A The main source for our investigations and lawsuits are complaints, people who call our office or write us or fill out a form on the Internet, complaining about a good or a service.

First a letter of clarification is sent to the business that's being complained about. Depending on what they have to say, we can move into a mediation process or we can work out the differences in a non-legal sense. Or if it appears that this is something that's victimizing a large number of Arizonans, we'll go to court and sue on behalf of the state of Arizona. We don't sue for an individual.

Catch a Q&A here every Monday. Hear the interview with Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard online at www.AzStarBiz.com.