One of the most ubiquitous things in the USA is the use of the Social Security Number (SSN) for proof of identification. The nation that has trumpeted for decades about the totalitarian nature of communist nations and others that try to control their citizens using a National Identification Number, has one itself.
Officially that’s not the case of course and it certainly was not the intention when it was created way back in 1936 as part of FDR’s revolutionary new Social Security System to support people who had retired with little or no other income. The lowest SSN number is 001-01-0001 which was given to Grace D. Owen and it was basically an account within that system and nothing more.
But naturally it had to be used early on by the Internal Revenue Service because of the special Social Security tax from your fortnightly paycheque that pays for the system, and now it’s also used by the military, banks, universities, health insurance companies, and pretty much every employer. Funnily enough it’s not on US Passports or Driver’s Licenses but on the latter it can be and it’s recorded in the system anyway.
Amusingly, in a sign of the future, nobody knows what the first SSN card created was, since they were being manually typed up in 1,074 typing centres and handled by the US Post Office, the Social Security folks then having few staff and no field offices. Even the first one officially issued was not the lowest numbered, as you might expect. It was simply the first one pulled off the top of the first stack of cards for which matching filing records were created, number 055-09-0001.
In another sign of things to come the first Social Security cheque given a retiree was to one Ida May Fuller in January 1940. She’d been a Legal Secretary, retiring in November 1939, started collecting benefits at age 65 and lived to be 100 years old. She had paid a total of $24.75 in Social Security taxes and would collect a total of $22,888.92 by the time she died in 1975.
===================
Which brings me to my two personal encounters with this system.
When I first got to the USA in the mid-1980’s I had a Student-Work visa but could not get paid until I got an SSN, and because I was young and too busy having a great time with hot American girls who loved my accent I procrastinated about walking into the giant bureaucracy just across the Chicago river to waste hours in queues to get paperwork to fill in. When it came time for my first paycheque to arrive, the company I worked for, mildly exasperated by my dilly dallying, told me that I had been assigned a “temporary” SSN to enable payment. I never bothered correcting this situation and never asked because it was bureaucracy and I was not staying permanently. Obviously my employer didn’t care and neither did the IRS; when would they ever turn down money?
When I returned a few years later things had tightened up – a little bit. The first bank I applied to get a cheque account with was very reluctant to open one because I didn’t have an SSN. They were persuaded only because my resume assured a well-paid job and I wanted to deposit $US 10,000!! What bank ever turns down money?
This time I was staying so procrastination was not an option. I went to a Social Security office out in the burbs where I was working, filled out the paperwork and got my card a week or so later, stamped with “Not For Employment”. That’s right sports fans: I was already working, and that declaration on the SSN card mattered not one jot to the bank, my employers, the Illinois DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles), the IRS or anybody else.
I was officially in the system. At a later date once all the legalities were worked out I did get a new SSN card that looked like any other. I still have it and paid boatloads of taxes for things like Social Security and Medicare that I will never collect on.
As a result the following two recent revelations about SSN’s do not surprise me in the least.
I doubt that amounts to much fraud, even if payments are still going out the door, although whoever is collecting them would be breaking the law – like the French guy a few years ago who kept his mothers desiccated corpse in the house with a blanket thrown over her so he could keep collecting her retirement money and other benefits (this is not unusual).
But clearly even the most basic checks in the system are broken and that, plus my experiences, tell me that assurances about the security of the system are not to be trusted.
Again, I doubt that this fraud amounts to much in this $US trillion+ system.
But how many times was my “temporary” SSN used by that company (long since merged with another) to pay other employees? How many other companies have been doing the same thing for decades – particularly those who employ guest workers and illegal aliens – like the vast meat packing plants and other food processing outfits in the USA. And of course what are other people doing with those duplicated SSN’s given their use as an ID…
No Minister 