Vox

What Was The Question Again?

Our company is a payroll service, which makes this time of year a bit more hectic than normal. In preparation to print the W-2's we will be sending out, we are attempting to verify the Social Security numbers and names of all the employees - no small task. It is made a bit easier now that the SSA provides a verification service, and this year their turnaround is just 24 hours.

It did take me a few tries to get the formatting right for the file I submitted, but I got it, and we got the results. 5% unverifiable - not too bad. After double checking the files and correcting those we transposed, as well as trying variations based on different guesses at their poor penmanship, we knocked the number down to a more manageable 10 employees.

That's when the phone calls go out.

We got several who called and corrected the errors (e.g. "Oh, my SSN is in my married name and I got divorced and gave you my maiden name") but this voice mail takes the cake - "This is [name]. I heard that you are having trouble with my Social Security number and need it to get me my W-2. I just gave you a new W-4 with my new address [proceeds to give me her address] so I don't know what the problem is. I am leaving now but you can call me in the morning." You know, leaving your SSN might have been a good thought since that is the problem - and she even said she knew it was the problem.

It turned out (as I found when I called back and got a hold of her husband) she has been married for years but hasn't bothered to tell the social security administration. Since, according to him, she just tried to get her drivers license updated and they wouldn't do it, citing the conflict between her SSN and her name, you'd think she would have known that - and told us in the voice mail. Duh.

Or maybe I'm just cranky.

Posted by Vox at January 12, 2006 07:04 PM | TrackBack | peeves , work