Holly Ramer of the Associated Press reports that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has corrected a problem that allowed non-U.S. individuals to obtain Social Security numbers already assigned to U.S. citizens. The problem was originally revealed earlier this year and was related to the fact that the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Republic of Palau were issue numbers that are then reported on grant or disaster loans to the U.S.
The USDA said Friday that it has replaced all the numbers of affected borrowers in its loan processing system with new characters that don’t match any U.S. numbers.