Over the past few months, the Social Security Administration has been engaged in an effort to clean up its records by identifying cases where the Social Security number provided by employers do not match the name and number in its records.
More than 800,000 employers have received “no match” letters, covering more than seven million employees. The Social Security Administration says that the new crackdown is unrelated to immigration concerns, but immigration advocates say that the result has been that as many as 100,000 undocumented workers have been forced to leave their jobs.
The situation has brought to light a fact that many have not been aware of: hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants are paying federal income taxes and contributing to Social Security. Indeed, one of the primary reasons for the “no match” letters is that the Social Security Administration has received increasingly large amounts of money from taxpayers whose Social Security numbers do not match Administration records. In 1999, this money totaled $4.9 billion.
Advocates for increased security argue that such a crackdown is necessary because the ease with which the September 11th hijackers obtained legitimate identification documents highlighted the dangers of identity fraud. The Social Security Administration stresses that the letters are not aimed at immigrants, adding that it does not share information with the INS. Nonetheless, the problem has become so significant that the US Chamber of Commerce received so many complaints that it has formed a task force to study the issue.
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