Editor's Note: An error in our forms survey regarding the State of Wisconsin has been brought to our attention. For the vast majority of their forms, inclusion of the Social Security number is optional. You may read about the correction here.

I've been writing about my recent experience as a victim of identity theft, and as part of that process have recognized how vulnerable our system is to the exposing and exploitation of critical personal info belonging to the injured workers we are supposed to protect. An analysis of state workers' compensation forms from across the nation revealed that currently, out of 3,417 forms, 734, or 21.5% require or call for a full social security number. As I've said in previous articles on the topic, these forms are shared with TPA's, carriers, state agencies, law offices, doctors' offices, support vendors and more. Each transaction point represents real risk that a breach may occur and injured workers' identities may be exploited.

That is simply unacceptable.

I've told you about the three jurisdictions that, as a percentage of total forms, were the worst on the list. They were the “bad”. Then I discussed the states that are working to resolve, or have already resolved the issue. They were the “good”. Now, for better or worse, we will discuss those states with the greatest number of forms that require social security numbers to be fully disclosed. These are the ugly. The very ugly indeed.

The winner of this ignoble award, the state with the most forms requiring full social security numbers, is New York. With 182 forms in their system, a whopping 47 of them require that data. That is 25.8% of their forms. To put this in perspective, they require this info on more forms than 15 other states have in their entire collection. That is a lot of unnecessary exposure!

Next up would be Nevada, with 31 out of 71 total forms calling for the social security numbers of injured workers. Wisconsin, previously listed as “the bad” with the highest percentage of forms containing that field, also turns out to be on the ugly list with 28 forms out of a total of 47. They are our only double award designee.

Lucky them.

Pennsylvania actually has more such forms with 37, but as noted in “the good”, they allow it as optional if a “WC-ID” is used instead. When they make that mandatory, they get upgraded to “the great”. Until that time, I suppose they are the “good and ugly”. In fact, in an ironic twist, 5 of the top ten states with the most forms requiring a SS# were previously listed as “the good” for their efforts to reduce the dependency on this element. They are highlighted in red in the table below. They have more work to do, but it is encouraging that they have at least recognized the problem.

The top ten states with social security fields on the most forms are:

This needs to change. Other industries have responded to the surge of identity theft by eliminating the blatant misuse of these numbers. Yet, the medical and workers' compensation complexes seem to lag woefully behind. A representative of one of our “ugly” states told me that they would like to stop, but can't (sounds familiar, doesn't it?). Their legacy systems are too antiquated, they cannot function without the numbers, and they lack the funding to get new systems.

I sympathize, but that will be little comfort to injured workers whose credit is ruined as a result of a needless data breach. Fight for the funding; fight for needed change. As someone who is going through the rigors of identity theft, I can assure you it is the last thing these injured workers should have to worry about.

And, in case you are wondering how your state fares in this competition, here are the full results of our forms audit, listed by percentage of forms requiring full social security numbers.

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