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by giantg2 863 days ago
Not true at all. If it's a required field it should be valid. If it's not required, then null is the correct value.
2 comments

That makes an unreasonable assumption that everybody across the whole industry is not just competent and can be trusted to have it together, but they also manage to achieve their important goals (which are not always having the cleanest code or architecture) using the same architectural dogmas as you do. One can define a datatype as FormattedValue | null, make a tuple of (value, present), have a special empty value or do all of that at once, because parts of the dataset were separately inherited during the merger.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen - I'm saying it's not the correct practice. When talking about financial services, this sort of garbage data could lead to compliance issues and financial penalties. Typically those mergers end up with remediation initiatives to at least ensure that all the invalid data is nulled out, or facilitate it's collection if it's critical.
I’am also a BofA client and can confirm - they use 000-00-0000 as an SSN when you don’t have one.
Can open a BofA account without a TFN or SSN?
Yes, if you say codewords along the lines “I have just arrived to the US and don’t yet have an SSN”. Worked for me.
Majority bank will specifically give you a bank account explicitly not requiring an SSN.