According to SSA they have issued under 500m SSNs and they are not reassigned after death. How have BILLIONS been found?
Its probably a mix of SSNs and EINs, there is no limit to the amount of EINs you can have. Except for the fact they will only issue one a day to a person.
How exactly do you have “billions” of Soc Sec numbers when they’re nine digits?
They get recycled. Not saying this isn’t hyperbole, but it’s the fact that those numbers are attached to legal names (even if the person is deceased) that’s problematic.
Around 450 million numbers have been issued, but each series is comprised of 9 numbers. Therefore 4.1 billion numbers have been issued. I’ll be here all week.
If this is US social security numbers, they only have 9 digits so there can’t be billions of them.
They get reused.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html :
Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?
A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.
Weird, I was quite confident in that memory. Thanks for the link.
All Americans should have frozen their credit years ago.
