4 ms·
> 1) XXX is the code for the office that issues your card. Can be guessed precisely and accurately by knowing birth location. While the first sentence is true,
by 5555624 2y ago
> 1) XXX is the code for the office that issues your card. Can be guessed precisely and accurately by knowing birth location.
While the first sentence is true, the second is only true if you were born after the mid-1980s, when a Reagan-era tax reform was enacted. (It required a SSN when claiming dependents.) Prior to that, most people did not get a SSN until they got a job.
- nostrademons 2y agoI looked this up and while your first sentence is true, the second (non-parenthetical) sentence is only true if you did not require any of the other services that required a SSN. There's a list of those under "Exhibit 2" (about 2/3 of the way down the page) on the SSA's website: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v69n2/v69n2p55.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v69n2/v69n2p55.html tl;dr: If you had a bank account, applied for a federal benefit, were on food stamps, applied for school lunch, or did any number of other financial or government transactions, you needed a SSN starting in the 1970s. That's enough of an incentive that many parents might've just applied at birth, figuring that their kid will eventually need it. Also everyone born 1968-1981 would've likely gotten one in 1986, when the change you mentioned about dependents was enacted, and then after 1988 they started being required for issuance of a birth certificate.
- 5555624 2y agoI stand corrected. Thanks. I didn't bother to look it up, since I'm old and got mine when I started working. Although people born 1968-1981 were getting SSNs where they currently lived, which is not necessarily where they were born; which was the original point.