EARNINGS SUSPENSE FILE

This afternoon, I heard Randi Rhodes talk about $6 billion in Social Security taxes that was collected but not assigned to anyone's account because the taxes came from illegal immigrants.

I think the amount of money might be much, much higher than $6 billion. The Social Security Administration has a special file for taxes that can't be assigned to a personal account:

Wages on those employer reports containing invalid names and/or Social Security numbers (SSN) cannot be posted to an individual's earnings record in SSA's Master Earnings File (MEF). Instead, these wages are placed in the Earnings Suspense File (ESF) - a repository for unmatched wages.

I'm sure some of the money in the ESF is a result of sloppy paper work or record keeping but not all of it. What's really surprising is the total amount in the ESF:

As of July 2002, the ESF contained approximately 236 million wage items totaling about $374 billion related to TYs 1937 through 2000 (see Figure 1). In TY 2000 alone, SSA posted 9.6 million items and $49 billion in wages to the ESF. Wage items and their associated dollar value are only removed from the ESF when the wages can be matched and posted to an individual's MEF.


I've written to the SSA to find out what they are doing and plan on doing with all this money. In reply, I was told that there will be a meeting at the end of May that will clear things up.