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Same Birthday, Same Social Security Number, Same Mess For Two Florida Women (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: After 25 years, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has fessed up to giving two Florida women who shared a name and a birthday the same social security number. The women only recently discovered that they shared an SSN, but not before having trouble getting loans and having tax returns rejected. You might think that the SSA would catch something like this, but as it turns out, they are prohibited from trying to verify the legitimate owner of an SSN, except in rare cases, says Ken Meiser, VP of identity solutions at ID Analytics, provider of credit and fraud risk solutions. And the problem isn't as rare as you might think (except for the part about two women with the same name born on the same day in the same state). According to a 2010 study by ID Analytics, some 40 million SSNs are associated with multiple people.
Maybe. Or maybe these duplicate SSN's are so common and it just happened that this one had the same legal name for both parties as well.
What is there to explain? Americans hate the idea of the UID *because* they all have direct experience with having a SSN. The way the SSN is, it is like having a password for very important things, but one that you have to give out to every street vendor to verify you as well. Identity theft nightmare for the owner.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
SSN started out merely as an identifying number to record social security payments. After awhile, though, it morphed into a number that identifies you for everything. However, this isn't a very secure number and it can be compromised in any of a dozen different ways. Combine this with a person's name and date of birth and you can do some horrible things to their credit rating while raking up huge debts in their name.
I know this first hand since I'm a victim of identity theft. Someone got hold of my name, address, DOB, and SSN (how, I'll never know). They opened a credit card in my name. (Despite, I might add, getting my mother's maiden name wildly wrong. So much for that "security question.") The only thing that kept this nightmare from being much, much worse was that they paid for rush delivery of the card and THEN changed the address on the card. The card was sent to me before the address change went through so I was able to shut the account down before any real damage was done. Of course, I still need to have my credit frozen for the rest of my life since my information's out there and could be used at any moment.
Fortunately, there have been enough identity theft stories in the news to make people aware of the situation. Unfortunately, too many companies require you to give your SSN when they don't really need it and too many people just assume "it's required so I have no choice."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
...my company's accountant told me that someone in Los Angeles had used my SSN and the IRS was trying to garnish my wages. She told them that I was certainly not Mr. Aguilar and that I was not responsible for Mr. Aguilar's debt to the IRS. Seems like a simple thing but she was not supposed to tell me about the incident. Because if the proles ever found out how often this happens, they'd lose faith in the integrity of The System. I, as the taxpayer and rightful SSN holder was never contacted by the IRS to either collect money or warn me that there was someone out there using my SSN, possibly ruining my credit.
For many years, I would just make up a random SSN for forms that didn't seem like they had a legitimate reason to be asking for it. Never, not once, did they later tell me there was a mismatch. So I think there was very little cross-checking going on.
There's a more sinister reason behind it. A huge chunk of W2s under duplicate SSNs are due to illegal immigrants using a fake SSN to work. You can't just make up any number - the IRS will reject that. So (presumably) they or someone they hire gets a real person's SSN, and the illegal immigrant adopts that person's name, identity, and SSN. "Fixing" this problem means creating a sure-fire way to prevent illegal immigrants from working in the country, so nothing is done about it. One party doesn't want to fix it because they want to make these people citizens so they'll vote for that party. An influential fraction of the other party doesn't want to fix it because they want these people to remain as a source of cheap labor.
I used to do the accounting at a company which I'm pretty sure had a not-insignificant number of illegal immigrants. Employers are only allowed to ask potential employees for certain pieces of ID, and the most common one is the Social Security Card. The government has no system by which an employer can verify a SSN matches other info the applicant provides, so all you can do is look at it and see if it seems real (it's super-easy to fake), make a photocopy of it, and keep it in the employee's file. If INS ever comes knocking, that's your proof that you've done your due diligence. Anyway, about a month or two after I completed everyone's W2s, I got a stack of letters from the IRS about "irregularities" with the W2s. Some careful reading between the lines and some web research turned up that these letters are commonly generated when two W2s are issued for the same person whose name and SSN match but other details (like address) differ. As an employer, you just sign saying that the employee swears that that's their real SSN, mail it back, and it becomes the government's problem. I'd like to do more as an employer, but my job is running a company, not immigration enforcement. The government doesn't even provide me with tools to verify it anyway. And the potential liability for incorrectly ratting someone out as illegal is huge.
"Fixing" this problem means creating a sure-fire way to prevent illegal immigrants from working in the country, so nothing is done about it. One party doesn't want to fix it because they want to make these people citizens so they'll vote for that party. An influential fraction of the other party doesn't want to fix it because they want these people to remain as a source of cheap labor.
Semi-OT, but I just want to throw out my favorite low-cost, low-effort fix for getting nearly all illegal immigrants out of the country.There are two steps:
1. Make it a criminal offense to hire a worker not vetted as legally able to work by the E-Verify system, and beef up the E-Verify system so it validates with roughly the same level of assurance as the US Passport issuance system. By "criminal offense" I mean "non-trivial mandatory jail time for the most senior company officer who approved/ordered the hire".
2. Offer permanent resident alien status (green card) to any undocumented worker who turns in his employer. The alien gets the green card whether or not E-Verify supports his right to work, to reduce the risk to the alien of coming forward. Phase this step in a year or two after the first, but make sure everyone knows it's coming.
I doubt the program would actually give out many green cards for shady employers. It would probably give a few out for bugs in the E-Verify system.
However, you're right that this won't happen because neither party really wants illegal immigration ended. My specific plan would also generate lots of objections among conservatives aghast at the idea of giving green cards to some "undeserving" people, even though the numbers would be small and the approach would be dramatically cheaper (theoretically appealing to conservatives) than other alternatives.
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Born in same area, same date, same first three letters of last name-- expect collisions.
Your SSN doesn't "hash" anything. From 1972 through 2011 (the range applicable to these two women), only the the first three numbers (the area number) actually meant anything in isolation. The middle pair of numbers (the group number) only has meaning within a given area, and even then it just serves to more-or-less evenly subdivide the area. And the final four numbers (the serial number) monotonically increases from 0001 through 9999.
So rather than a collision, you could more accurately call this a race condition. Two requests go in at approximately the same time without adequate semaphores, and the serial number didn't get incremented early enough in the process to avoid both processes getting the same "next" number available.
The geek in me would love to know if no one ever received the next number in sequence - Did they double-increment after issuing the number, or did one of them overwrite the other?