Are Your Social Security Number and Birth Bond Traded? The CUSIP Claim

The claim begins with a document most people have never examined closely: their birth certificate. Proponents point to features of certified copies — patterned paper, a printed serial number, sometimes the name of a printing company. From these details a theory has grown: that each birth certificate is in effect a bond, issued by the state and representing the future labor of the child; that these bonds are deposited, pooled and traded on financial markets; and that each one can be found by a CUSIP number derived from the person's Social Security number or birth certificate number.

The archive has examined the wider theory of accounts opened at birth in Treasury Accounts at Birth and the link to public bonds in Bonds, Surety, and Public Finance. This entry tests the specific mechanism: the claim that birth bonds and Social Security numbers are traded as securities and identified by CUSIP numbers.

What a CUSIP number is

The name CUSIP derives from the Committee on Uniform Security Identification Procedures. The identifier exists to give each security a unique code so that trades can be cleared and settled reliably. CUSIP is a registered trademark of the American Bankers Association, and the system is operated by CUSIP Global Services, managed on the Association's behalf by FactSet Research Systems.

A CUSIP is a nine-character code. The first six characters identify the issuer; the next two identify the specific issue; the ninth is a check digit computed from the first eight. CUSIPs are assigned to stocks, corporate and municipal bonds, Treasury securities, and similar instruments. They are assigned by the operator on application by the issuer or underwriter and recorded in a database used by brokers, clearing houses and regulators.

The theory holds that a person can find "their" CUSIP by entering their Social Security number or birth certificate number into a formula or a website. No published description of the CUSIP system provides for identifiers derived from personal numbers, and there is no documented record of CUSIPs being assigned to individuals or birth certificates.

What the Social Security number is

The Social Security Act, signed on August 14, 1935, established the old-age insurance program, and the first Social Security cards were issued in 1936 to track workers' earnings. The number was intended as a record-keeping device. From 1946 to 1972 the cards carried the legend "Not for Identification," which was dropped in the 1972 revision of the card, as the number's use spread to tax administration and, later, banking and other identification. Section 7 of the Privacy Act of 1974 placed limits on government agencies' ability to require disclosure of the number.

Social Security taxes are paid into trust funds, which by law (42 U.S.C. § 401) are invested in interest-bearing obligations of the United States — special-issue Treasury securities. This fact is real and is sometimes offered as support for the theory. But those securities are issued to the trust funds as a whole, not in the names of individuals, and they are not traded on public markets. Individual workers do not own them, and they are not identified by personal Social Security numbers.

What the birth certificate is

Birth registration in the United States is a state function, organized through state vital records offices. A birth certificate records facts of birth for legal and statistical purposes.

The physical features of certified copies are the most frequently cited evidence for the theory. Anti-forgery features are an ordinary precaution for a document used to obtain passports and other identification. Whatever the printing, the theory still requires an issuer, an instrument and a market, and the federal agency that would have to hold such instruments says plainly that they do not exist (see below).

Where the theory comes from

The CUSIP claim is a later extension of redemption theory, which arose in the late twentieth century from earlier criticisms of the 1933 monetary changes. Its premises are that the government pledged citizens' future labor as collateral and created an account for each person. The CUSIP mechanism attempts to give that idea concrete form: if the accounts exist, they should have identifiers, and the identifiers should be findable.

That is the theory's real strength and its test. It makes a specific, checkable claim. Securities with CUSIPs appear in public and commercial databases, are held in custody by identifiable institutions, and generate records of issue and trade. If birth bonds were traded under CUSIPs, there would be issuers, underwriters, custodians and trading records. Proponents have not produced such records, and the identifiers offered as evidence generally either correspond to unrelated securities or do not exist in the CUSIP system.

How institutions have responded

The Treasury's published fraud guidance addresses the claim directly. It states that birth certificates "cannot be used for purchases, nor can they be used to request savings bonds purportedly held by the government," and that the so-called "Exemption Account" is "a false term; these accounts are fictitious and do not exist in the Treasury system." It describes the birth-certificate story as a variation of the older bogus sight-draft scheme, for which it reports that "federal criminal convictions have occurred in several cases."

What can reasonably be concluded

The documented facts are these: CUSIPs identify securities issued by identifiable issuers; Social Security trust funds are invested in special Treasury securities issued to the funds, not to individuals; the Treasury states that accounts linked to birth certificates do not exist. None of these facts establishes that individual birth certificates or Social Security numbers are traded as securities, and no record of such trading has been produced.

What remains genuinely worth asking is how a person's legal identity came to be constructed through numbered records — a question the archive takes up in Birth Certificates and the Question of Identity. The sense that one has been converted into an entry in someone else's ledger is understandable. On the present record, the ledger is administrative, not financial.