Tuesday, July 19, 2005

First Look

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.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

this is awesome - it is helpful as real estate attorney to know how things work at the registry and what its like for you fabulous people. (im not brown nosing i hardly ever get to lowell for my work but i appreciate the people i see and the help i get at the registries i do go to)
anyway this is social security information in public records issue is kind of disturbing. I didnt get to read prior entries but what is to be done about this? is the state, registry, IRS or MA DOR doing something to change their forms to avoid posting ss numbers?