One of my sons turned 17 the other day and went down to DMV to get a driver’s learning permit. When he took inventory on the way out of the documents that he had brought with him, he found he was missing his SS card. We searched all over, went back into the DMV office etc. etc. and came up empty. Lost. My best guess is that it slipped from his grasp on the way out and blew away. (The DMV people say if it turns up they’ll put it in the lost-and-found, but they won’t call us, and have no number at which we can call them.) Leaving aside the hassle of getting a new card, I’m concerned about ID theft.
From looking around a bit, most of what I see on the subject is for people who already have credit cards and the like. My son is barely 17 and has no credit cards or bank accounts or anything of the sort. So he also wouldn’t have a credit report on file with any credit bureaus. But I expect he’ll have these things one day. So the questions are: [ol]
[li]How big of a concern is this for a 17 year old kid?[/li][li]What can about this at this time?[/li][li]How far down the line is this a concern?[/li][/ol]
You assume he’s got nothing but that isn’t a safe assumption. The credit bureaus do not know how old a social security number is and will issue to a minor’s number. Some parents take advantage of this and get cards out for their kids to build a credit history, some bad parents get cards for their kids and then ruin their kids’ credit. A kids ss number is perfect because it’s never been used so there isn’t a file already and the kid won’t find out for years.
It’s really no more of a concern than someone getting your SSN somehow. Yes, the SS card is one form of ID acceptable in some circumstances, but I’m not aware of any where it is accepted as the sole ID.
Your kid should apply for a replacement card, which creates a paper trail that he lost his card, which might be of minimal use should he need to contest anything. Otherwise, he just needs to pay attention to his bank accounts, tax filings, credit ratings, etc.
My wife and son were about to head down to the SS office to get a new card (you need certification from your doctor or something like that - at least for a minor) when my son decided to take another shot at calling the DMV. I had called them (indirectly - you call a statewide number and they call the local guys) a few days after the incident, and they said they did not have it. But this time - over two months later - they said they had it. They had it in some sort of lost-and-found bucket and we picked it up and all is well.
So the question is where it was in the interim. My son is convinced that the DMV person had dropped it on her end, and then, having denied it when we initially asked her about it, couldn’t admit it and waited a while until she could surreptitiously sneak it into the l&f. If that’s the case, then we should be OK. The other possibility is that someone else found it and who knows what might have happened to it in the interim. But the card did not show any signs of outdoor exposure.
So they didn’t have a callback number yet you called them and got the card back? Most likely it got into the L&F bucket and wasn’t seen or searched for the first time you called. Its been sitting there ever since.
Everybody has lost several SS cards in their lifetime. I’ve probably had three or four of them. There is apparently a law of some kind that it must remain on its original flimsy paper forever, cannot be laminated, and no substitute shall be accepted. And, if you still have an old enough original, emblazoned with the laughable warning “Not to be used for identification purposes”.
