RE: Enforced Costraints (sic) ?? and the eternal question of SSN'

SSN is a unique identifier for an ACTIVE Social Security Administration account. They CAN be (and are) reassigned after the person is dead and all their survivor's benefits have been settled up.

Also, if you are not an employer, you are heavily dependent on the person to tell you what their number is. If you have a unique key on SSN, if somebody else gives you my SSN, then I have all kinds of hassles using your software because I then have to give you a false one.

Our business is duplicate record detection in hospital patient databases. Guess what: duplication of SSN is common and by no means an absolute indicator of duplicate records.

Brian Norrell
Manager, MPI Development
QuadraMed
511 E John Carpenter Frwy, Su 500
Irving, TX 75062
(972) 831-6600

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2001 1:07 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Yes, SSNs are NOT reassignable.

At 08:41 AM 6/12/01 -0800, you wrote:
>SSN's are not recycled.
>
> From the SSA OIG's testimony on SSN use and misuse before congress -
>
> "The SSN is a unique identifier"
>
> http://www.ssa.gov/oig/Testimony05222001.htm
>
> SSN is a perfectly good PK for personnel systems. If you find duplicates
> your employer certainly needs to know about it.
>
> I once had a personnel database with 25 years of personnel data (about
> 1,200,000 individuals). When we loaded it into Oracle with the SSN as
PK,
> there was one duplicate SSN. Of course, that employer was very
> conscientious about requiring a valid SSN.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Author: Hal Wigoda
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-- 
Author: Norrell, Brian
  INET: BNorrell_at_QuadraMed.com

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