Social Security Numbers, Part Four

Social Security Numbers, Identity Theft, Congress, and Your Protection, Part four of my five part blog,

“Other” Legitimate Uses of the SSN;

The fact of the matter is individuals have a lot of information associated with a SSN. Credit bureaus, health insurance companies, legal records, bank records, and more can be associated with a SSN. The SSN is a legitimate method of tracking down a person or identity for purposes ranging from finding a lost heir to discovering the location of a criminal. A SSN makes it easier to track a person or identity when the person or identity needs to be found for legal matters.

Lexis-Nexis testified there are approximately 43,000 Robert Jones in the United States today. Obviously, not every Robert Jones is going to have a unique birth date. Private investigators may use the SSN to locate or correctly identify an individual or a record. Perhaps Robert Jones is owed $10 million from a prize commission, but recently moved from his home in Chicago, Illinois. A private investigator, using a SSN, will have an easier time of uniting the man with his money.

The SSN is one of many necessary identifiers used to put a face to a name. Private investigators and other entities use social security numbers as just one of many identifiers. An identifier that is genuinely unique from one person to the next person.

While this may not have been the expected purpose of the SSN, the inception of one unique set of numbers for each individual person has benefits far surpassing that of a simple tax identification number.

In fact many states use or used the SSN as the their resident's primary Drivers License Number. This is true in the case of the state of Missouri who used the SSN as their resident's primary form of ID and Drivers License Number until December, 2005.

It's unexplainable that Missouri and a few other states did not recognize this unbelievable gross error in judgement before identity theft was rampent all over the internet and world.

Patrick L. Baird

Private Investigator

Part One >>: "SS Numbers, Part One"

Part Two >>: "SS Numbers, Part Two - Identity Theft Crisis"

Part Three >>: "SS Numbers, Part Three - Legitimate Uses for the SSN"

Part Four >>: "SS Numbers, Part Four - Other Legitimate Uses for the SSN"

Part Five >>: "SS Numbers, Part Five - The Solution"