Originally Posted By: artie505
1. There's absolutely no reason why a 1099 from the Social Security Administration needs to include your full SSN; they just couldn't be bothered with caring about the people whom they're supposed to care for.

2. Granted that reissuing all existing Medicare cards would have been an immense burden, not to mention the fact that the process would have been susceptible to all sorts of glitches that would have messed up people's lives, but I don't see any reason for they're not having made a change on an ongoing basis other than, again, their not having wanted to be bothered.

3. The military is the military, and who's to question military "wisdom"?

You are overlooking government regulations our purchasing major assets like a Navy ship, an office building, a fighter or bomber, or a computer system (hardware and software) such as those used by the IRS, Medicare, etc]/I]. One of these requirements is a major asset must have an expected lifespan of at least twenty-five (25) YEARS. The intent of congress in passing those regulations was to save money by making sure the cost of an asset could be amortized over a long span of time. When those regulations were written in the '50s and '60s very few people were aware of the accelerating rate of technological change and even fewer could even imagine the unintended consequences of those regulations in the future. (NOTE: desktop and laptop computers are cheap enough they do not trigger the asset regulations and are therefore free of those constraints.)

Add to that the universally dismal performance of various government agencies upgrade programs, typically budgeted for five (5) YEARS and those routinely go over budget and over schedule by 100% or more. There are any number of examples of this including a fairly recent debacle at the IRS, and AFIK an ongoing debacle at the FBI or maybe it has migrated to DHS responsibility (and that IMHO is a disaster in and of itself).

Not all government appointees are a waste of space, and thank goodness there is no small number of dedicated and thoughtful senior civil service managers who are well aware of this problem and have taken what action they can to work around these regulations. One tactic is to "privatize" or contract out mass data management tasks and not always to U.S. companies either — the competition for those contracts can be fierce). But as the saying goes, "knowledge is power" and would you really want all of your tax returns under the control and management of Google or all your health data under the control of Microsoft? I am not that sanguine about the IRS having all that data about me, but I can't come up with an acceptable alternative.

If you were beginning to wondering if I was ever going to get to the point I have finished my lecture 🗣. Rationally, to you and to me, dropping all but the last four digits of the SSN from a 1099 appears trivial but the changes required in the IRS system alone would cost probably hundreds of millions of dollars and maybe five to ten years to accomplish (assuming congress would authorize the expenditure, which is unlikely). But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Last year my wife and I received...
  • 2 - 1099 Social Security
  • 1 - 1099 INT
  • 4 - 1099 DIV
  • 4 - 1099 R
  • 23 - 1099 MISC
  • and a variety of other tax related forms
all reported to the IRS by the originator either by USPS or electronically, all sent to me by USPS, all reported by me to the IRS electronically along with my form 1040, and all containing, at a minimum, my...
  • Full name
  • Legal address
  • Social Security Number
and in aggregate revealing...
  • bank account numbers
  • organizations and companies I do business with
  • enough information that in the hands of a malefactor could easily wipe me out financially
Given it is essential for the IRS to correctly link all these disparate pieces of information together, (by the way due to many legitimate reasons mention my name is not exactly the same on all the various documents) it is difficult to imagine how that could be accomplished without the SSN being out there and almost by definition vulnerable. I can conceive of schemes that would get around the IRS having to have a unique identifier for taxpayers, but I believe all of them would have unacceptable [i]unintended consequences.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein