Every weekday morning, Cedar City police send an e-mail informing reporters of people they arrested the previous day. The list has the suspect's name and the offense of which he or she is accused, a date of birth and address, and another item: a social security number.

Don't be surprised. While identity thieves have forced most of us to regard a social security number as top secret, government agencies in Utah still publish them on all sorts of documents. Search my files at The Tribune offices and you'll find dozens' of people's social security numbers printed on arrest reports, court files, jail logs and property records.

A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office discusses the scope of the issue. Local governments have collected these numbers for decades for identification purposes. Governments are suppose to make their records available to the public. The report opines:

In weighing how best to address some of these open issues over the availability of SSNs in public records, Congress will need to balance the need to keep SSNs confidential with the long standing tradition of open access to public records, the rights of states and localities to regulate the availability of records they maintain, and the use of SSNs in the private sector.

Utah law forbids releasing social security numbers as part of voter registration records and a few other specific circumstances, but there is no blanket prohibition. The GAO report suggests disclosing the numbers might already be illegal under a federal law, but says no one has tried enforcing that law. Meanwhile, scrubbing social security numbers from the Cedar City arrest log and scores of other public documents could be a massive undertaking for local governments.

To download the GAO report, click here.

Labels: open records