At 4:13 PM 11/13/96, Black Unicorn wrote:
Exercise for the reader: How does the bank verify SSNs?
OK, I'll bite. My guess is that the bank sticks the SSN in a report to the IRS and the bank is happy with the SSN as long as the IRS doesn't complain about it. Now, does the IRS check? I suspect that they don't, either. Their objective is to look for "matches" with SSNs that show up on filed tax forms, since they want to verify the data on the tax form. Given the behavior of every other large database I've ever seen, I'd guess that there would be a huge number of SSNs that don't in fact associate with tax forms. If someone High Up hasn't decreed that they should chase such things down (and allocated heaps of money to do it), they'll ignore the mismatches. This seems consistent with the reports of people who use bogus SSNs for decades at a time. Rick. smith@sctc.com