SSN Policy Manual

Policy Manual

absence of a credit history, you will need to talk to the manager or operations manager about establishing trustworthiness in some other way. Showing trustworthiness is one key to opening the account you need. If your application for an account is rejected (it most likely will be), it is important that you remain polite and wishful. Your niceness remains important because we need the bank to document the reason they rejected your application. Therefore, you need to follow-up with a letter to the branch manager so that the bank will state their reason for rejecting your applications. You may use the sample letter "First Response to Account Rejection" on page 237. (Note, it is important that you do not include your telephone number on any letters. This prevents them from calling you and forces them to write any reply.) The bank's branch manager should reply to your letter by listing the items you need to correct in order to open the account. Additionally, they should expand upon their reason for demanding a social security number. Usually they will include something such as the following: Federal regulations require that we obtain a social security number or tax identification number for many types of accounts, such as bank deposit accounts that pay interest. Get a little Tougher In this phase we will challenge the financial institution's reason for denying you an account. Generally, their reason relies upon one of the following assertions: Law - The financial institution will state that federal law requires customers doing business with them to disclose a social security number. Policy - The financial institution will state that it is their policy to require all customers doing business with them to disclose a social security number. Sometimes their reason will combine both a policy and legal statement. Their reason for rejecting our application determines what we say next. If it is simply a "it's our policy" kind of rejection, then we challenge them with the privacy act. However if they base their rejection on law, then we will also do a privacy act challenge and we will add an "under color of law" violation warning. Challenging Their Assertion of Law Attempting to trick or intimidate somebody into doing what you wish by telling them that it is the law, when it is not the law, is a felony. It is legal to tell someone to do something without reason, but is illegal to tell somebody that they must do something because a nonexistent law requires them to do it. For example, I can legally say to you "you must get a social security number." But, I cannot legally say to you "you must get a social security number; it's the law and you will go to jail if you don't get one." In the first example, I simply told you, without giving any reason, to get a number. However, in the second example I attempted to intimidate you into getting a number by lying about the law. Federal law makes it a crime to trick you "under color of law" into doing something that you are not required to do.