Background Investigations - The Use of Social Security Traces

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When we are conducting a background investigation on a person, we do not always have a legitimate business reason to run a full credit report on that person as part of that investigation. By law, we cannot obtain a person's credit report without a signed release. One of the great things about a credit report, other than the financial information that it provides, is that it provides information about a person's past addresses and can help us discover identity theft issues.

A Social Security Trace report provides what is called a Credit Header. This is the information that is at the top of your credit card statement or "the header" of the statement as well as at the top of a Credit Report. The information will include any name or address ever associated with the social security number that was ever given to a company providing you credit or for which you applied for credit. This includes credit cards, mortgages, car loans and other lines if credit. It will also include any changes that you submited to companies providing you credit, like a change of address or maiden name. All of this historical information is complied by the big credit bureaus and is sold to companies that provide Social Security Trace reports.

A Social Security Trace report is helpful in an investigation, because it can tell us if the Social Security number provided is actually associated with the subject of the investigation. We can also, in most cases, decipher when the Social Security number was issued and in what state. This information can then be cross checked with other information previously obtained during the investigation.

Why is past address information so important?

Because it tells us where to focus our criminal records checks. Since there is no legitimate National Criminal Records check available for private companies and there are over 10,000 courthouses in the US, we need to narrow down the states and counties where the person lived and check in those areas for a criminal record. The Social Security Trace report can verify some addresses we might already have and also fill in some additional addresses that might otherwise be unknown. Since statistics show that in the US, more than 72% of persons arrested are either arrested in the county in which they live or an adjoining county, identifying past addresses is crucial to an effective background investigation.