If you have ever received a notice in the mail from the Social Security Administration, odds are your Social Security number was on it. Of the 352 million notices the agency mailed last year, about 233 million included the recipients’ full SSNs, potentially putting people at risk of identity theft, according to an inspector general report released on April 27.
The government has long advocated that agencies stop using the numbers as personal identifiers, and many large agencies have already done so. The IG recommends that SSA follow suit and prioritize removing SSNs from their mailed notices and re-evaluate how much it would cost to do so.
