Feb 18, 2018

How Did This Become Social Security's Responsibility?

     From the Ripon Advance:
U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a member of the Senate Committee on Finance, teamed up with a bipartisan group of colleagues to urge the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) to better protect Americans from identity fraud and theft in an era of rapid financial transactions.
Along with U.S. Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Tim Scott (R-SC) and Gary Peters (D-MI), Cassidy raised concerns with the SSA over the practice of synthetic identity theft, which they noted involves creating a false identity by combining several persons’ actual data and made-up information. ...
The senators requested that SSA modernize its Consent-Based Social Security Number Verification system (CBSV) to combat the problem while securely enabling businesses to quickly process consumer transactions. The CBSV program requires the private sector to obtain an individual’s consent to verify if a given name, date of birth and Social Security number (SSN) match a government-issued source, according to the letter.
However, the CBSV has been hindered by its requirement that users of the program obtain a person’s actual written signature before using the database, an action the senators said “negates the utility of CBSV to combat synthetic identity fraud,” and slows down the ability of financial institutions to make rapid determinations on consumer financial products. ...
     By the way, I'm astonished to see that the Ripon Society still exists. It was founded to advance liberal ideas within the Republican party. Once upon a time there were liberal Republicans. They really did exist.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Once upon a time there were rational Democrats. They really did exist.

Anonymous said...

Thank you Mr President for pointing that out.

Anonymous said...

Considering how willing Congress has been to underfund SSA's administrative budget, I would be hesitant to put more work on its plate, even if what they were proposing was a good idea. Do we need another unfunded mandate?

Anonymous said...

As far as funding, the end of the full article says:

'Additionally, private sector end-users pay enrollment fees and per-transaction fees that fund CBSV operational costs. “Since private sector end-users of CBSV seem willing to maintain and support this funding structure, we see no budgetary concerns that should negatively affect your decision to upgrade and modernize this system to handle expanded demand and ensure near-continuous availability,” the senators added.'

I don't know if that's true or not (that SSA could pass all costs to users). Anyway, I don't think allowing e-signatures makes identity theft less likely. A big cause of identity theft is that corporations want to use the SSN as proof of identity, and the proposed change is just to enable them to do verify the SSN more quickly. So I think it's for their benefit and not ours.

Anonymous said...

I agree that this is not Social Security's responsibility.