Re: Soc. Sec. # on Official Records

[Jeff Eichorst <u112237@lanl.gov>]

Bob,
What you say is true, but nonetheless, these organizations that you mention
can not require you to use your SSN for these purposes (except maybe the
military, who for all intents and purposes owns you).  It is illegal to deny
services on the grounds of refusal to disclose a SSN.  Of course SSN and IRS
are exempt.

Jeff Eichorst

At 10:19 AM 6/30/97 -0500, you wrote:
>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.
>
>
>
Jeff Eichorst
Occurrence Investigator
Los Alamos National Laboratory
ESH-7, MS K999, Los Alamos, NM 87545
505.665-6980		505.665-6977 fax
505.996-1117 digital pager,	jeichorst@lanl.gov

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