Dallas School District Caught Using Random SSNs For Foreign Workers
The Dallas Independent School District has been making up fake Social Security Numbers for foreign hires for years, even after being told in 2004 by the state's education board to stop because it's illegal. The numbers were meant to "expedite" the hiring process and get the employees on payroll, but they found their way onto Department of Homeland Security and IRS forms (which are kept in-district but shared with feds upon request), were used for criminal background checks, and in at least 26 cases were numbers in use by real people.
The Dallas Morning News doesn't mention whether or not the DISD will be contacting the people who have had their SSNs appropriated, but they did offer this detail:
The DISD-issued Social Security numbers began with "200" – a prefix assigned to people in Pennsylvania, and Mr. Phillips' office noted that many ended with sequential numbers.
In general, though, with the exception of the occasional criminal background check, the fake SSNs were supposedly kept away from any legitimate use, and even if your SSN fits the description above the odds are low anything bad has happened. We're just amazed at the school district's monumentally bad judgment.
"Dallas ISD faulted for using fake Social Security numbers" [Dallas Morning News] (Thanks to AttorneyWrangler!)
(Photo: Getty)
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Comments:
Everything is fine until the IRS audits you for unreported income.
Good work Dallas!
No one who has lived in Dallas any amount of time should be surprised by this.
What's wrong with them? They can't wait until an identification number has been obtained through proper channels? If they thought it was okay, why didn't those involved volunteer to use their OWN social security numbers?
Basically the Democratic Party supports illegal immirgrants stealing others SS cards which they then get credit cards and can ruin your credit but yeah go figure a lot of people didn't respond to this one
What the hell. They make it sound like oh well. Are these people going to get prosecuted?
Wow. This after losing 65 million and having to fire 600 teachers a month ago... Can I ask that my school property taxes be sent else where?
Col. Sanders: "Are we being to literal?"
Dark Helmet: "No you idiot. We were told to comb the desert, so that's what were doing. Found anything yet?!"
Comb group 1: "No sir!"
Helmet: "How about you?!"
Comb group 2: "Nothing yet, sir!"
Helmet: "What about you?"
Comb group 3 [using a hair pick]: "We ain't found SHIT!"
While they shouldn't be using valid numbers, what kind of half-cocked system would make it so an SS#, devoid of any other valid context, can do anything to anyone besides throw up flags?
@Pious_Augustus: What amazes me is that ignorant people; like Pious, still manage to come up with crazy blame theories to point fingers at anybody (democrats in this case) when this article has nothing to do with anything even remotely political. Texas is a predominantly a Republican State in which most govermnet offices and school districts are run by conservative right-wing types; therefore, Pious' comment sounds even more stupid...
You Go Girl!!!
Its fraud and they should all be fired over it.
It makes me sick to know these people are in charge of teaching the children of Dallas. What a great lesson to everyone - if you can't do something right, make up what you need to hurry it along.
why don't they just use 666 instead of 200 which is a valid SSN prefix?
I wouldn't be so quick to point at this as fraud. I went to a school (RIT) that during my freshman year still used SSNs as ID numbers. They assigned alternate ID numbers for foreign students, but those numbers were still in the same xxx-xx-xxxx format as a social security numbers.
This is all well and good (except that I think it may be illegal to use a SSN as an ID number for this very reason.. at least I think that's the reason they gave for switching the system after my freshman year) until you start relying on that database field to contain a person's social security number. Sure, for 90+% of students it does, but what if you're doing some automated tax form that pulls that data? You can't assume it's a SSN, but of course people do.
So basically instead of having separate ID and SSN fields, they combine them. Very rarely is this a problem.
If "Teachers" are hear illegally and using FAKE SSNs (or numbers that don't belong to them). Then they should be handcuffed and booted from the country just like any other illegal alien.
Send them home and give the job to an unemployed American teacher.
Jeez you just fired a bunch of teachers and kept the bilingual ones because the number of illegals in Dallas is going up astronomically. Why not teach existing teachers?
@rick_in_texas: While I am in no way defending DISD (the single worst school district I have ever heard of), the story makes no mention of illegal aliens. It mentions foreign hires, which is an altogether different thing.
D-
@chumia40: You obviously don't live in Dallas. As a whole Texas is a Republican state, the Dallas/Ft. Worth Megalopolis is not.
@FLEB: No kidding. It's really not that hard to generate a pseudo-random 9 digit number. In fact, it comes up in basic programming classes. But to start them all with 200...*SIGH*
If you're going to commit fraud, do it right, at least.
@KeeganGwar: It's entirely illegal and the school I went to in CA before transferring up was using SSNs.
@KeeganGwar: But those were ID#s that just happend to be your SSN and in a SSN format, not Fill in SSN Here _________________ and you put in a fake SSN.
@rick_in_texas: Most if not all the teachers were here on work visas, but DISD was just to lazy to wait the 2 weeks to get SSN's sent to them.
Then they should be handcuffed and booted from the country just like any other illegal alien.*ahem*: 500K* illegal immigrants defying deportation orders
*The article itself gives a figure of 560K
Actually, this is not an issue of using them for ID within the school for students. The school was using them for tax purposes. The computer will not allow them to process payroll for a person with a national ID of some sort. The school did not have IDs on these guys so they made them up.
Beyond the other stupidity, I'm wondering just why they used the 200 prefix. There's actual blocks of SSNs that are guaranteed to not be in use. [en.wikipedia.org]
Wait - so you're using FAKE social security numbers to run background checks on TEACHERS??????
And you wonder WHY people are up in arms about pedophiles in the schools?!?!?!
This INFURIATES ME! I imagine Dallas is the only one that's been caught so far - but I doubt that they're the only one's using this practice.
@KeeganGwar: The best way to do this (because I once ran into this problem) is to make the ID number a hash of the SSN (a hash is a number spit out by an equation which is fed another number, but the process can't go backwards)
That way, you can reserve a range of hashes for those who don't have SSN's. problem solved.
@projoe1979: the whole school district should be disolved and restructered... it is a black spot on the Texas education system.
Foreign workers without the proper identification numbers, while there may be other situations where that happens, the overwhelming majority of people in that situation are going to be illegal immigrants. I don't think you can really blame people for assuming that, given how many people nowadays like to tiptoe around the subject.
Is this the number they're supposed to be getting?
In what situations would someone be eligible to work in the US AND not have that number? Are they hiring people directly from Mexico? Otherwise, I can't think of any, but I'm not an expert.
@stacye: Dallas... as in the actual city of Dallas... is surprisingly left leaning.
head towards Fort Worth for the Republicans...
The number of people that live in Texas only for business purposes, or because they were the offspring of an illegal immigrant tend to water down the Republican numbers.... give it another decade and we will be blue.
@BluePlastic: DISD is full of FAIL. They have been for years. (I live north of Dallas, NOT in that school district thank GOD) Kids don't have to go to class, turn in homework, pass tests, or basically even BREATHE to pass. They had an $80 MILLION budget deficit this year, so they laid off hundreds of teachers... then rehired a few dozen because they'd fired too many. Oh, and a few years ago the teachers had anonymous debit cards and there was a $1 million a year deficit there too. DISD SUCKS. SOOO glad I don't live in Dallas County.
@valsharess1: Actually, most of the recent problems in Dallas county started about a decade ago when democrats took over Dallas county. He has a point, but I don't think he knows it.
@m4ximusprim3: Huh? So you take a nine digit number, run it through the wash, and still end up with a nine digit number, if I'm reading you right.
The issue here is that even though they were assigning what they thought were random numbers to these foreign workers, that eventually, these fake ID numbers got released into the world and were mistaken for real SSN's somewhere and those numbers matched up to real people's SSNs in some database. Never mind that they used 200- as the first three numbers and that corresponds to Pennsylvania residents. Your hashed up fake numbers in most cases would have the same problem unless you avoided using all known "good" SSN prefixes in the output numbers, no?
It's like telephone numbers on TV shows and the movies-- they always use 555- as the prefix because that prefix is owned and used by the telcos themselves and wouldn't lead to a private person if someone tried to dial the number on the TV show just for kicks. Dallas should have at least investigated the numbering structure of SSNs to pick a three digit prefix that didn't show up anywhere in the SSN numbering scheme. Randomizing and hashing a number wouldn't necessarily avoid the problem
@LostAngeles: There's no federal law against that use, actually, and it's not even questionable under FERPA if it's a private institution. Some states do forbid such use, but California isn't one of them.
See [www.privacyrights.org]
@scoosdad: No, nobody needs a 9 digit ID number. No school district in the world has a billion employees.
You hash the ssn to a 5 digit number and reserve 00000 through 09999 for manual entry (for situations like people without SSN's). The SSN is never public, and can never be misused or transferred to a tax form, like it shouldn't be. You have to eliminate the temptation to use "shortcuts" by denying inacurate information.
@TechnoDestructo: Teachers are subject to extensive background checks. I'm not denying illegals get lots of jobs, but I don't think they could be a teacher any more than they could have a security clearance.
@shorty63136: No. Please read the article again, this time very slowly. Take a deep breath with fingers off the shift key. :)
The linked article sums up the problem very clearly at the very end. Here's their summary:
•Foreign educators on visas were assigned false Social Security numbers to get them on DISD's payroll.•The foreign employees were instructed to obtain Social Security numbers from the Social Security Administration and report them to the district.
•The fake numbers were supposed to be used temporarily until real numbers were in place. But some of the fake numbers wound up being sent to the Texas Education Agency when DISD asked TEA to conduct background checks on new hires. Those numbers stayed in the system if DISD didn't replace them with real Social Security numbers obtained by the employees.
See the problem now? The foreign-born employees-to-be were assigned numbers that were supposed to substitute for social security numbers in their payroll system, so that they could get paid right away. At some point those fake numbers got mistaken for real ones and were used to conduct background checks on some of the new employees. And since they were, in some cases, real people's numbers up in Pennsylvania, problems came up for the new teachers if the Pennsylvania holder of that same number might have had a criminal record.
This is SOP for the U.S. government when dealing with foreign students. In Japan, if a Japanese citizen wants to attend a college or university on a U.S. military base (which a limited number do), they are issued a fake social security number in order to do so. One of my students has been attending a college with its main campus in Texas and a branch on a base here and she forwarded the message which contained said fake number to me (because she wasn't clear about what it meant and wanted me to explain it).
So, I'm guessing what the school did isn't limited to Texas or even to schools.
Please fix this moron. This is about the most offtopic crap I've seen in a long time.
Social security numbers were never meant to be used for identification or for running background checks in the first place. In fact, SS cards used to say something to the effect of "NOT TO BE USED FOR IDENTIFICATION". Of course, they became a de facto national identity number and they took that wording off.
These were not "illegal aliens" and they do not need to be "deported." These were foreigners recruited, hired, and brought here by the school district. They have legal work visas to be in this country.
It was a stupid move to put fake numbers in the payroll system to expedite the process. But that is a problem with the payroll system, and the people running that payroll system. The teachers were here legally, and not at fault.
@projoe1979: rdm is right. Don't forget about the credit card fiasco where people looted DISD for thousands of dollars of purchases.
Glad I don't live in Dallas or Dallas County.
Hey, that's the same number I have on my luggage.