Social Security Number (SSN)

A Social Security Number (SSN) is an identification number for a person that is used by the Social Security Administration (SSA) and other government agencies like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). While SSNs were designed to be unique, there have been rare instances of duplicate assignments. A SSN is assigned at birth, or during the immigration process. Enigma also verifies Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITIN) against submitted persons.

For information on how to verify a EIN/TIN against a submitted business name, please see the TIN Verification attribute.

SSN Verification

Verifying the SSN for the Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) is a critical component of Know Your Business (KYB) regulations. When a client requests a SSN be verified, Enigma will verify that the SSN is valid and that it matches the person’s name submitted. The SSN should be passed as a 9-digit string.

Enigma can return any of the following responses:

In the case of a "Failure" response

If a "failure" status is received then the client will need to retry SSN verification. Before retrying, we recommend the client confirms the SSN is correct. In the event of an IRS availability error, keep in mind the IRS can be down for a few minutes to several hours at a time. If retrying is not ideal or continues to be unsuccessful, the client can request documents, like their SSN card or a tax document, from the person to verify the SSN.

Instructions to access this attribute

The SSN verification attribute is an optional add-on attribute that is not included in a package by default. The attribute must first be added to your account to access. If you are interested in using this attribute, please contact our sales team to have it added to your account.

Once the attribute has been added to your account, you can retrieve it by passing ssn_verification in the attrsparameter and passing a 9-digit string in the ssn field. If you only want to retrieve the SSN attribute (e.g. retrying in case of a failure), then you can omit the package parameter and only the TIN attribute will be returned.

For instructions on how to integrate with the API, please visit the KYB endpoint page.

Request example:

curl --request POST 'https://api.enigma.com/v1/kyb/?package=verify&attrs=ssn_verification&top_n=1&match_confidence=0.5' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'x-api-key: YOUR-API-KEY' \
--data-raw '{
    "data": {
        "names": [
            "Enigma Technologies"
        ],
        "addresses": [
            {
                "street_address1": "245 5th Ave",
                "city": "New York",
                "state": "NY",
                "postal_code": "10016"
            }
        ],
        "person": {
			    "first_name": "Jack",
			    "last_name": "Roberts",
			    "ssn": "000000000"
			  }
    }
}

Response example:

"risk_summary": {
        "legal_existence_risk_rating": "low",
        "activity_risk_rating": "low",
        "watchlist_risk_rating": "low",
        "overall_risk_rating": "low",
        "tasks": [
            {
                "task_name": "ssn_verification",
                "status": "success",
                "result": "ssn_verified",
                "reason": "SSN and Name combination matches IRS records"
            }
        ]
    },

Data sources

• Internal Revenue Service (IRS)