by William Neikirk
Top members of the House Ways and Means Committee from both parties want to limit the use of your Social Security number by government and business in order to crack down on identity theft, a growing scourge in society.
A bill they introduced Monday falls short of an outright ban on using the number for governmental or business purposes, but its sponsors say it would help reduce the amount of identity theft. The question is whether the exceptions allowed under the bill would still give identity thieves enough room to operate. Time will tell, as they say.
But by permitting some exceptions, the sponsors do tacitly concede that your SSN is still a mighty handy universal identifier for many government and business purposes. It would still be possible to use it for credit purposes, for example. And I know a lot of people nervous about mentioning their SSN in public when applying for credit in a store.
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