Update on the Social Security number project we started last week. A quick review…we assigned an employee to go through record books dated from January 1,1995 to June 30,1995. He is writing down the “book and page” and “document type” of documents that contain a social security number. Today I received a small sample of these to review. As of this morning we have checked 80 record books containing approximately 4,000 documents. We found 375 documents containing Social Security numbers. This is approximately 5 per book or 9% of the documents. As expected the vast majority with SS# are Mass and Federal Tax documents. The list also included a very large number of death certificates. Mortgages and Mass Assistance Liens were also listed, but there were significantly fewer than the other document types. I would like to caution …this is a small sample and the picture may change as more information is collected.
