Immigrants stealing U.S. Social Security numbers for jobs, not profits - Americas - International Herald Tribune
By John Leland
Published: Monday, September 4, 2006
Camber Lybbert thought it was a mistake when her bank told her that her daughter's Social Security number, issued by the U.S. government, was on their files for two credit cards and two auto loans, with an outstanding balance of more than $25,000.
Her daughter is 3 years old.
For Lybbert and her husband, Tyson, the call was the beginning of a five- month scramble trying to clear up their daughter's credit history. As it turned out, an illegal immigrant, Jose Tinoco, was using their daughter's stolen Social Security number, not in pursuit of a financial crime, but in order to get a job.
The numbers are used in the United States by the government to track employees for tax purposes.
"From what I've picked up, he wasn't using it maliciously," said Lybbert, who lives in Draper, Utah. "He was using it to have a job, to get a car, provide for his family. My husband's like, 'Don't you feel bad, you've ruined this guy's life?'
"But at the same time," Lybbert added, referring to her daughter, "he's ruined the innocence of her Social Security number because when she goes to apply for loans, she's going to have this history."
Though most people think of identity theft as a financial crime, one of the most common forms in the United States involves illegal immigrants using fraudulent Social Security numbers to conduct their daily lives.
With tacit acceptance from some employers and poor coordination among government agencies, this practice provides the backbone of some low- wage businesses and a boon to the Social Security trust fund.
During the 1990s, such mismatches accounted for about $20 billion in Social Security taxes paid.
"It's clear that it is a different intent or purpose than trying to get someone's MasterCard and charge it up, knowing they're going to get the bill," said Richard Hamp, an assistant attorney general in Utah. "But it has some similarities. It goes on the other person's credit record. Illegals are filing for bankruptcy, using someone else's number.
"I had one 78-year-old with three defaults on houses she never owned."
The Federal Trade Commission, which estimates that 10 million Americans have their identities stolen each year, does not distinguish between people who steal Social Security numbers so they can work and those who are out to steal money.
Illegal immigrants make up nearly one of every 20 workers in the United States, according to estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center, and most are working under fraudulent Social Security numbers, which can be bought in any immigrant community or in Mexico.
In Caldwell, Idaho, a woman named Maria is just such a worker.
Maria, 51, came from Mexico City illegally six years ago and bought a counterfeit green card and Social Security card through a friend for $180. She earns $6.50 an hour, and like most of the seven million working illegal immigrants in the United States, she pays income tax and Social Security tax.
She agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her last name not be used.
"We know we'll never get it back," Maria said of the Social Security payments. "It's unfortunate, but it's a given."
Like most victims of identity theft, the Lybberts did not lose any money in the long run, but Camber Lybbert estimated that for four or five months she spent 30 hours or more a week making telephone calls, feeling passed from one agency or voice-mail system to another: the Social Security Administration; the Utah attorney general; the three credit bureaus that issue credit ratings; and the police departments in two cities.
"Everyone I talked to handed me off to someone else, saying that's not our department, call this number," she said. "I was being led in a circle."
The Social Security Administration each year receives eight million to nine million earnings reports from the Internal Revenue Service filed under names that do not match the Social Security numbers. Some are from workers whose employers botched their personnel forms or women who recently changed their names after marriage.
Others are from people using a Social Security number that is not their own.
"It's basically a subsidy from migrant workers to the aggregate of American taxpayers," said Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology at Princeton who studies Mexican migration, about the taxes paid to the government.
While no one knows how many of these mismatches are illegal immigrants, a Government Accountability Office study found that employers with the most mismatches were concentrated in industries that hire a lot of illegal immigrants, including agriculture, construction and food services.
"Right now, employers are not motivated to care if their workers give them false Social Security numbers," said Barbara Bovbjerg, the office's director of education, workforce and income security issues.
The Social Security Administration is legally barred from sharing information with immigration or law enforcement agencies, or from telling the rightful owner of a Social Security number that someone else is working under their number, said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman.
The rightful owner of a stolen number does not get the benefits accrued under its false use.
Bovbjerg's office and others have called for better cooperation among the Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, and Department of Homeland Security to prosecute workers who use false Social Security numbers and companies that hire them.
"We've had this ridiculous situation where, theoretically, this information could be shared and we could identify these people and repair the situation," said Marti Dinerstein, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit organization that supports tighter restrictions on immigration.
"Falsely using a Social Security number is a felony. Our own federal agencies are working against those laws. The IRS says privacy laws prevent them from sharing information. So we know who the guilty employers are," Dinerstein said. "The IRS knows who the guilty employees are. And nothing's being done about it."
In 2000, using data from the Social Security Administration, the Utah attorney general's office found that the Social Security numbers of 132,000 people in the state were being used by other people, far more than the state could prosecute.
This use caused problems even when the person using the number led a financially responsible life, said Hamp, the assistant attorney general. "I've had families denied public assistance for their children or disability payments because records show somebody is working in their Social Security number," he said.
Scott Smith, of Ogden, Utah, discovered that someone was using the Social Security number of his daughter, Bailey, when he applied for public health insurance for her.
Smith, who owns four paper shredders, is by his own description "real paranoid" about identity theft. "We even take the shreddings and put them in different garbage cans," he said.
Like Lybbert, he has mixed feelings about what happened next.
"All that was happening was that the illegal alien who had gotten the card had gotten a job at a Sizzler steakhouse in Provo and was paying her bills and doing a good job," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/world/americas/04iht-id.2688618.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
