mr. devries. >> thank you, members of the subcommittee. thank you for the opportunity to represent the office of knowledge inment as a personal identifier. in 1962, the civil service commission adopted the ssn to identify federal employees. over time the ssn became universal to every piece of paper in the federal employee's personnel file. the ssn was used for routine personal actions to request health benefits and for many other purposes. in 2007 opm issued guidance to develop consistent and effective measures for use in safeguarding federal employees ssn's. the intent of these measures was to minimized risk of identity theft and fraud in two ways and one by limiting the use of ssn as an identifier and by strengthening the protection of personal information including ssns from laws. examples of the measures that we recommended were eliminating it the unnecessary printing and display of the social security number and forms of your computer displays and restricting access to only those individuals who had a need to know and they were notifi

mr. devries, you said something interesting. you have stopped collecting social security numbers for applicants for employment of the federal government? >> correct, sir. when an applicant is going to enter or wants to come into the government and they go to the sites we no longer collected that social security number from them at that time. >> when do you collect their social security number? >> once we match up the job applicants against the job postings and the agency takes that referral list and list of applicants and narrow it down and make the final selection. when they bring that person on to make them an employee offer is when the agency hiring them collects that from them then. >> i know they would use their social security number for tax withholdings and such, what else would they use their social security number for when they were looking to hire someone? >> mostly that it's your status of employment and then the benefits that come with it whether it's pay and reported back to the irs and social security side. >> do y