savage@ssc-vax.UUCP (Lowell Savage) (05/03/85)
All of this talk of problems with non-citizens finding jobs reminds me of a story I heard from my old boss at the school computer center (which handled administrative computing). It seems that one day, my boss got a call from someone who was just irate! "Young man, I understand that you have been taking it upon yourself to assign social security #s. This is a federal crime and I am part of the ... [some enforcement arm of the S.S. administration] and I intend to see that you and your fellow perpetrators get put behind bars! . . . ." Well, my boss asked what sort of evidence this guy had. The response was, "We've been getting S.S. contributions for someone from New York who has been dead for 50 years!" Then, my boss had to talk this S.S.A. official out of the actual number. When he got it, he turned to his terminal and extracted the record that con- tained that # in the student ID field from the data-base of students. It was a foreign student from an non-English speaking country. When he told the S.S.A. official that he had found the name of the student, that "confirmed" his "guilt" and it was about all he could do to both keep the official on the line AND get a word in edgewise. However, he finally managed to get the official off his high horse long enough explain that the school was giving out numbers purely for its own internal purposes, that these numbers had an 'S' appended to them (to de- note, of all things, 'Student'), and that the school made no claims about these numbers being S.S. numbers. He then postulated a senario where this foriegn student, "just off the boat", and looking for a job in the nearby restaurant, would be asked for a strange # on some card. He would pull out the card he had recieved most recently (the good 'ol student ID) and ask "Is dis?". The employer would see a 9-digit number (with an 'S' appended) and figure that it was a S.S.# and not bother to check. And so everyone would be happy until someone in the S.S.A discovered that for several months, payments were coming in for someone who had died 50 years before! Makes one wonder how the S.S. system has stayed in place as long as it has! I guess it's not as crucial to catch money coming in that shouldn't be coming in as it is to check for money going out that shouldn't be going out. By the way, in case you're wondering, my boss never heard from this S.S.A. official again. At least as far as I know.