R-1 religous workers' use of Social Security numbers
The Office of the Inspector General ("OIG") of the Social Security Administration ("SSA") recently released a report on Religous workers' use of Social Security numbers. The religious worker program has come under a great deal of scrutiny lately because of alleged fraud. The objectives of the study were to (1) assess Social Security number (SSN) use by non-immigrants with a religious worker classification as well as to (2) evaluate Social Security's own internal processing procedures. I will discuss the results of the first objective.
In order to conduct the study, the OIG selected a population of 5,392 nonimmigrants to whom SSA assigned original SSN's based on evidence that they were R-1 religious workers from April 1, 2005 through March 31, 2006. From this population they randomly selected a sample of 200 records to assess R-1 religious workers' use of SSNs. The OIG found that some religious workers were using their SSNs for purposes other than to work for their sponsoring religious worker organizations.
The OIG found that only 3 out of every 10 (31%) R-1 religious workers had solely religious wages posted to their earnings record from 2005 through 2007.
Wages for the remaining individuals in their sample were categorized as follows:
- About 4 out of 10 (39%) R-1 religious workers had no wages reported.
- About 1 out of 10 (11%) R-1 religious workers had only self employment earnings.
- About 2 out of 10 (19%) R-1 religious workers' earnings records only had wages recorded from non-religious organizations (6%) or some combination of religious or non-religious wages and/or self-employment earnings (13%).
Based on their findings, the OIG recommended that the SSA strengthen their evedentiary requirements before assigning SSNs to religious workers. Specifically they recommended that Social Security require the R-1 religious worker to submit proof that he or she has secured employment or a promise of employment from a sponsoring religious organization before assigning the SSN.
The results of this study are not suprising as even in the best of times, religious workers have a hard time maintaining employment or earning a living wage from the sponsoring organization. In fact there is probably more fraud than this report reveals because there may be R-1 workers who are working for cash in non-religious employment. Cash wages are not reported. The OIG did not have to conduct a study to determine that R-1 workers were not always working for their petitioning employer.
What would have been more relevant to learn is how soon after the R-1 worker arrived in the United States did the R-1 worker start engaging in non R-1 religious worker employment? Stricter evedentary standards at the local Social Security field offices will not be helpful when the employees are not immigration officers and do not know what to look for and when it is my guess that most people engage in R-1 employment when they arrive and then later violate their status.
