Re: Validating Social Security Numbers

SSN #'s have never been guarenteed to be unique. There are stories every year of people who have been assigned duplicate SSN's. Also, I've run into the problem with aliens in the US who must be assigned numbers ( in a special sequence that I believe gets reused ) for tax purposes, etc. but who then become citizens and get another SSN.

Besides that, SSN's are not to be used for identification purposes other than for Federal taxes, etc. but then eveyone, including State Governments, ignores this.

jim gregory

>==========Jeff Bangle, 4/15/97==========
>
>
>I have two questions related to using SSNs in computer databases:
>
>1. According to several sources, including the Social Security
>Administration (see below), the first three digits of each SSN represent
>the geographic location where the number was issued.
>
> http://www.ssa.gov/history/geonumb.html
>
>Using the list at the above web page as a guide, I checked our internal
>database and found that about one percent of our records had
>"impossible" SSNs. Are all SSNs that don't match the list above
>definitely incorrect?
>
>2. I've heard several times over the years that the Social Security
>Administration has started "reusing" SSNs from people who died many
>years ago. Is this true? It would be a major pain to modify our
>database to accept duplicate SSNs and still uniquely identify people.
>

Views expressed are mine and do not reflect those of my employer or clients. Received on Thu Apr 17 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT