And this same federal government wants to oversee our health care?–Ed.
When Tropical Storm Chata’an struck the Federated States of Micronesia in 2002, the U.S. government sent 1,300 blankets, 4,000 disposable diapers, 30 cases of sardines — and my Social Security number.
The nine digits that govern so much of Americans’ identities are supposed to be ours for life — and only ours. But mine ended up linked to a Micronesian man who defaulted on a disaster loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration.
I didn’t find out until March, in a letter from a debt collector threatening to garnish my wages if I didn’t pay $7,306 in two days. The same could happen to an unknown number of others, because of a processing glitch that the U.S. Social Security Administration didn’t even know existed and the federal government hasn’t fixed.Who is giving away American Social Security numbers to strangers in other lands? The answer is not so simple.
The problem involves three Pacific island nations, each of which has its own, independent Social Security Administration. The three — the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Republic of Palau — grant defense rights in the region to the U.S., and in exchange receive aid, including grants and loans after disasters.
For instance, the Federal Emergency Management Agency sent $20 million to 9,700 people in the Federated States of Micronesia after the 2002 storm. The three countries together have received USDA housing grants and loans worth $33 million since 2000.
Some federal agencies collect locally-issued Social Security numbers from grant and loan applicants and report them to credit bureaus as if they were U.S. numbers, regardless of whether the numbers already are in use.
That’s the beginning of the problem, which isn’t identity theft but can create some of the same headaches when identities become linked in the eyes of lenders or creditors.
“This can really slow you down if there is a default or a history of bad payment,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of information privacy programs at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has known for years that it creates “overlapping” Social Security numbers when granting loans in the three island nations, said Donald Etes of the agency’s rural development office in Hawaii. The office that processes loans is working on a fix, but there have been no software or policy changes yet, he said.
My own case — involving a Micronesian man who failed to repay an SBA loan — illustrates how the resulting hassles play out and also shows that I’m probably not alone. Of 299 people in Micronesia who took out SBA loans, more than 200 haven’t paid up, increasing the odds that others have shared my experience. No one has a good estimate of numbers.
The collection agency told me the debt, though listed under another name, was associated with my Social Security number. Despite knowing I wasn’t at fault, I felt my face grow hot as the debt collector rattled off a list of everywhere I had ever lived.
“You’ve never had any debt like this?” he pressed. “NEVER?”
He backed off within days, but I spent weeks calling and e-mailing federal agencies, banks, credit bureaus and collection agencies in four countries and five time zones trying to untangle the rest. In many cases, no one could explain why it happened, because they weren’t convinced it could happen.
It turns out that Social Security numbers in two of the three Pacific Island nations don’t even have nine digits like U.S. numbers. They have eight, but some U.S. computers automatically add a zero to the front to fill in the blank.
Sometimes, that creates new numbers beginning with a double-zero — just like New Hampshire’s Social Security numbers, and Maine’s.