Tax Season Woes - Already!

It's only February but the filing headaches have already begun! I recently got my W2 from my former employer. Where my SSN should be, they listed the first five digits of my phone number. My readers will remember, this company cut another guy and me loose this past summer. When they mailed me my last check back in July, they attached a final statement to it with my YTD income and taxes. Except it wasn't mine, it was the other guy's. Now here comes my jacked-up W2 in the mail. Either they are highly incompetent or they are having fun with me.

Hypothetically, what would happen if I didn't tell them to fix the W2? Could I just pretend that income never happened? Of course the answer is no, because (1) that would be unethical and (2) the IRS would catch on in 2009 and then back-bill me with two years of interest and penalties! In the meantime, would the IRS go after some poor guy whose social security number matched my phone number and ask him for the money? No. No one has that SSN. The first nine digits of my phone number are not a valid SSN yet. It will be issued, years from now, to someone in Ohio. Which brings up an interesting question. What does your SSN mean? How is to derived?

The first three digits of your SSN tell where it was issued. Nowadays it's issued based on the zip code of your mailing address. My phone area code is 281. A SSN 281 prefix is issued to people in Ohio. The second two numbers are a batch number. The 281 group is only on batch 11 now, and my next two digits are much higher than 11. Speaking of SSNs, you can read some interesting but useless trivia on the history of the social security numbers, including who had 001-01-0001 and how much was the first social security benefit check, at this site.