By: Kristan Frend
As my colleague Margarita Lim discussed in her December 3rd article, the SSA announced that it will change how social security numbers (SSNs) will be issued, with a move toward a random method of assigning SSNs.
For organizations that currently incorporate the validation of an applicant’s SSN issue date and state as a part of their risk-based decisioning, they will lose this piece of applicant authentication post-randomization.
But there is some good news – first, this validation piece won’t be entirely terminated on day one of the SSN randomization for organizations. All the change means is that the newly issued SSNs will be randomized. In other words, the only SSNs that the issue data and state won’t be validated on day one are the SSNs that have just been issued to the recently born or immigrants. Given that its likely newborns won’t be applying for credit for another 18 years, the bulk of the newly issued SSNs that organizations will see for a while are those belonging to adults who were recently issued a SSN…A growing number of applicants, but not the majority of applicants.
The other bit of good news is this may actually be a good thing for all of us in the long run. While we’ll end up losing the ability to validate an applicant’s SSN issue data and state, the criminals will be at an even greater disadvantage. Consider this- Last year researchers* were able to “identify all nine digits for 8.5 percent of people born after 1988 in fewer than 1,000 attempts. For people born recently in smaller states, researchers sometimes needed just 10 or fewer attempts to predict all nine digits.”
I don’t expect this change to drastically reduce third party fraud rates but over time it should eliminate one component of identity theft and ultimately benefit an organization’s Customer Information Program.
*The National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, Carnegie Melon Cylab, and the Berkman Faculty Development Fund provided support for the research. To view the entire study, please visit http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full.pdf+html.