TAX LIENS – THE DOORWAY TO YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER SLOWLEY CLOSES

Tax liens are public records and for many years the Social Security Number of the person subject to the lien was included in the record. As a public record it became accessible in public records searches.

The author was subject to a tax lien placed in error by a taxing authority. The lien was placed one morning years ago and removed by the afternoon. However the public record lingered and the SSN was available to anyone with a public records search facility.

However recent legislation required that the full SSN not be released in public records. Records in recent years have not contained the last four digits of the SSN. The first five digits have been reported.

Our recurring eye-spy reporting system has noticed that for clients with old tax liens the full SSN report is slowly being replaced in favor the abbreviated SSN. The process has been slow, and it will take several years for the full SSN of old tax liens to be fully removed. However this gaping security risk is slowly being lessened.

Tax liens are more common that many people think. In an experiment in our home town of 4,000 residents, we located the full SSN of over 2,300 by searching public records for tax liens within a given zip code. In other words more than 50% of our fellow townspeople were at risk of disclosing their SSN.

However a word of caution to all. Even the elimination of tax lien reporting of full SSN’s does not eliminate the ease with which an accomplished database specialist can obtain SSN’s. Skilled searching will still find individual SSN’s with relative ease.