Your Social Security number serves as the primary means to confirm your identity. It's uniquely tied to your name and date of birth. In cases where individuals share common names, additional details like your middle name, driver's license number, and previous addresses help establish your specific identity.
Each time an individual divulges his or her SSN, the potential for a thief to illegitimately gain access to bank accounts, credit cards, driving records, tax and employment histories and other private information increases.
Social Security provides a foundation of income on which workers can build to plan for their retirement. It also provides valuable social insurance protection to workers who become disabled and to families whose breadwinner dies.
We help older Americans, workers with disabilities, and families in which a spouse or parent dies. We estimate that about 184 million people worked in Social Security-covered employment in 2024 and paid Social Security taxes. As of September 2024, about 68 million people received monthly Social Security benefits.
An SSN is used to track an individual's yearly earnings and the number of years they've worked. These figures are required to compute potential financial benefits, whether they relate to retirement income, disability income, or health insurance.
An SSN trace, also known as as Social Security background check, returns information related to a Social Security number. This information can include when and where the SSN was issued, as well as any associated names like aliases and maiden names.
If you think someone may be using your SSN to work, check your Social Security Personal Earnings and Benefit Statement. You can get a copy by calling 1-800-772-1213, or online at www.ssa.gov/online/ssa-7004.pdf.
Your Social Security Statement (Statement) is available to view online by opening a my Social Security account. Millions of people of all ages now use these online accounts to learn about their future Social Security benefits and current earnings history.
The Serial Number, itself, doesn't say anything about your location or age that the Group Number and Area Number don't already say, although since they are assigned consecutively, they could potentially reveal your relative age within a Group and an Area.
Sometimes called a Social Security number background check, an SSN Trace is a search of databases, including lending institutions, utilities, schools, and credit card companies, for a Social Security number.
It also includes personal information (name, date of birth, sex, date of death, date of filing, relationship to the SSN holder, entitlement to benefits on another SSN, benefit amount, and payment status) and, if applicable, information about a representative payee, disability entitlement, workers' compensation offset ...
Have you heard about the Social Security $16,728 yearly bonus? There's really no “bonus” that retirees can collect. The Social Security Administration (SSA) uses a specific formula based on your lifetime earnings to determine your benefit amount.
An SSN trace also doesn't provide comprehensive information about an applicant such education or employment history. It is therefore crucial that you conduct additional searches to verify the information reported by an applicant.
An alias (sometimes called “also known as,” or “aka”) is any variation of a candidate's current legal name or a different name that's associated with the candidate, such as nicknames. Other common aliases are maiden names, hyphenated names, suffixes, or shortened names.
It is a crucial step in confirming an applicant's identity to ensure that the individual is who they claim to be, a critical aspect in the hiring process. Employers in the United States are also required to verify an employee's SSN for taxation and legal work status purposes to maintain compliance with federal laws.
An identity thief who has your social security number and other personal information could do a number of things with it, including: Open new credit accounts, like credit cards or car loans, in your name. Claim tax refunds that rightfully belong to you. Create a fake identity to get a job, apartment, or other services.
Because of its use as a unique identifier, the SSN is one of the most sensitive pieces of personal information in our records. It is the key to identifying and retrieving most of the highly personal and sensitive information we maintain about individuals.
If your spouse dies, do you get both Social Security benefits? You cannot claim your deceased spouse's benefits in addition to your own retirement benefits. Social Security only will pay one—survivor or retirement. If you qualify for both survivor and retirement benefits, you will receive whichever amount is higher.
The maximum Social Security benefit at full retirement age is $3,822 per month in 2024. It will be $4,018 a month in 2025. It's $4,873 per month in 2024 if retiring at age 70 and $2,710 if retiring at age 62.