Somewhere in the halls of Sahuarita Middle School in Tucson walks a boy who already is a deadbeat debtor.
He isn’t old enough to qualify for credit. But at the house his family was evicted from recently, someone used his name and Social Security number to rack up a $950 unpaid bill with Tucson Electric Power.
The boy’s mother — a financially troubled woman with a string of criminal convictions — says she doesn’t know how the bill ended up in her son’s name.
This is an especially unpleasant manifestation of a wider problem. I wonder why we can’t revert to a system in which credit must be obtained in person by people using multiple forms of ID (including picture ID), with banks and credit unions serving as middlemen for credit card companies (not just their own). It wouldn’t stop identity theft, but it would make it much harder. The Social Security number as the basis for identity approach is, as the article demonstrates, ripe for abuse.
The SSN was never supposed to be used as a national ID as it is now. The rest of the Federal and State governements need to stop using it. Banks need to stop using it. Having one centralized ID number is too dangerous.