Should We Kill the Social Security Number?

ABC News reports:

While tax season is still producing eye twitches around the nation, it’s time to face the music about tax-related identity theft. Experts project the 2014 tax year will be a bad one. The Anthem breach alone exposed 80 million Social Security numbers, and then was quickly followed by the Premera breach that exposed yet another 11 million Americans’ SSNs. The question now: Why are we still using Social Security numbers to identify taxpayers?

From April 2011 through the fourth quarter of 2014, the IRS stopped 19 million suspicious tax returns and protected more than $63 billion in fraudulent refunds. Still, $5.8 billion in tax refunds were paid out to fraudsters. That is the equivalent of Chad’s national GDP, and it’s expected to get worse. How much worse? In 2012, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration projected that fraudsters would net $26 billion into 2017.

FDR and the progressives claimed Social Security would never be used as an ID.