Re: Soc. Sec. # on Official Records

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 12:57 PM 6/27/97 -0500, you wrote:
>RadSafers:
>
>It has been our normal practice to include workers' social security numbers
>on each of their official records such as training records...
>

The Social Security Act made it illegal to use the Social Security CARD as
a means of identification. The card lacked any identifying information that
could be used to verify that it belonged to the person displaying it (this
was in an age when no one's driver's license had a photo on it). However,
the SSN has been in use by the US government as a unique ID since 1969 when
the Air Force became the first agency to use it to track an individual's
records. Nowadays, it is used throughout the government as an ID for all
sorts of things not related to IRS or medical info. The NRC wants dose info
reported by SSN, and so does DOE (see DOE Order 5484.1 on annual reports).

An employer can assign its own unique number for a person, but employees
tend to forget employee numbers, and non-employees (contractors, visiting
scientists, etc) NEVER remember them. This means the site's operating
organizations would have to maintain the ability to keep looking the
numbers up in the computer system to allow placing the number on specific
records where a tracking number is necessary. We certainly don't have the
staff to perform this function, and I suspect that few if any other places
do, either.

Assigning an employer-generated number can work in the computer, but the
Privacy Act requires written permission from an individual before a
government agency or a government contractor can release personal
information about that person. Dose info is covered by this. Positive ID of
an individual usually requires the SSN. An employer's number would not be
useful for this at some time after the person no longer works there; such a
number would be forgotten by the former employee, but his/her SSN wouldn't.

The USAF used the name and last four digits of the SSN as a casual ID check
when I was in (69 to 75), but the person doing the checking was always just
asking for the last four even though he/she had the full SSN available.

It may be risky to use the SSN like this, but it appears to be the only
practical system we have available to us. An awful lot of other people,
including every Federal agency (and, I suspect, pretty much every state and
local government as well) uses the SSN this way.


Bob Flood
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(415) 926-3793     bflood@slac.stanford.edu
Unless otherwise noted, all opinions are mine alone.