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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim S who wrote (59956)	6/13/2007 1:37:06 PM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

"Cool your jets, Oecon." That was not a poke at you. Just anticipatory and pre-emptive of a certain other. "But, when an illegal starts paying into Social Security on a non-valid SS number, who is in a position to detect that? ... I'd be very surprised if someone at the SS office DIDN'T notice." Only if someone got their "Your Social Security Statement" in the mail and noticed the numbers were too big, and decided they should report the extra money they were being credited to law enforcement ... or ... if someone programmed SS's computers to search records for suspicious anomalies (such as contribution credits on a 3-year old's SSN) and SS reported such findings to law enforcement. As with the IRS, there are probably some (but not necessarily overwhelming) reasonable legal (and perhaps economic) arguments for not giving law enforcement access to records without probable cause. I suspect, however, that with careful legal crafting and civil liberties safeguards, such mining of SS records might be helpful. But I think a mandatory verification system would be more effective and would raise fewer legal issues.