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by benmanns 4449 days ago
Wow! I had no idea. According to http://www.idanalytics.com/news-and-events/news-releases/201...

> More than 15 percent of SSNs are associated with two or more people. More than 140,000 SSNs are associated with five or more people. Significantly, more than 27,000 SSNs are associated with 10 or more people.

2 comments

Yup. It was stated over and over again that SSNs were not supposed to be a form of ID, but nobody pays attention...
I've always wondered how the SS administration deals with this. SSN _should_ be unique, but in practice they're not, so how do these people deal with taxes and _gasp_, social security?
If I were to guess I'd say they use other ID factors such as name/dob
That article is referring to corporate records, though, and leads with the fact that many people have multiple SSNs if you track all their commercial accounts as gospel truth. Does social security actually hand out duplicate SSNs, or is this all caused by people not remembering theirs/bad typing?