Jul 10, 2007

No Match Letters May Gain Importance

Greg Siskind has an important blog on immigration law. He is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security will soon publish a regulation telling employers that they cannot ignore a "no-match" letter from Social Security notifying them that the name and Social Security number of one of their employees do not match. The employer will be considered to be in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act if they do not resolve the issue within certain time limits. If true, this would put the Social Security Administration in a place that it does not want to be -- in the forefront of the battle against illegal immigration. If nothing else, it would create plenty of business for Social Security when many women who never got around to it in the past have to suddenly notify Social Security that their names changed when they got married. This is not what Social Security's understaffed field offices need.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Illegal aliens should be deported, not supported.

SSA is part of the federal government. There is nothing improper about SSA's assisting another federal agency in its efforts to enforce immigration law.

Anonymous said...

I get the idea and it's a good one in theory, but as someone who works for the agency and handles matters like this, holy moly-the workload could be immense. we can barely handle the amount of no match disclosure requests now.

Anonymous said...

If SSA can do something to help stop illegal immigration and employers from hiring illegals, why shouldn't SSA help or I guess this would "unduly expend the United States' resources for private purposes." LOL

As far as married women the employer is supposed to record the name as shown on the SSN card, so if a woman never updates the SSN record she's supposed to still be using the previous name.

Plus most state DMVs now check the driver's license application against the SSN record, so married women that don't update their SSN record get caught that way as well.

Anonymous said...

I don not think it is improper for the SSA to assist in this way. The problem is that there is not enough staff to handle the workload involved.

Anonymous said...

Identifying and resolving 'no-match' problems as they happen will save SSA twice as much time down the road. There's nothing wrong with cleaning up data.

Anonymous said...

"down the road" as in when ssa's budget and staffing shortfalls result in complete collapse because of resources wasted on nonsense like this.