There is an exception. This person (or anyone without a Social Security number) may pay taxes to the IRS with an Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN). This number can be used by legal and illegal workers to make Social Security tax payments (the number is not shared with immigration authorities as a matter of law, but also because the card is available to citizens who simply don’t have a Social Security number).
What does this mean?
ITIN filers pay $9 billion in payroll taxes annually. This means that the legal and illegal population gets access to Social Security benefits.
However, that money is a tiny drop in the bucket. The Social Security “Earnings Suspense File” has forms dating back to 1937. This is for money that the system has collected without a match to a person.
Taxes in this fund have been paid on $1.3 trillion in wages. (An example of a suspense account for a citizen is a person who changes her or his name upon marriage (including hyphenated versions), and this person accrues payments in the system under two different names.)
Social Security estimates that it has about 340 million unclaimed tax forms recorded in the suspense file.
Stephen Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, estimates that about 1.8 million immigrants were working with fake or stolen Social Security cards in 2010. He estimates that undocumented immigrants paid $13 billion into the retirement trust fund that year, and only got about $1 billion in benefits.
The $12 billion in unclaimed contributions for 2010 amounts to funding for people who are legally working in the U.S.
Credit: Alexia Fernandez Campbell, “The Truth About Undocumented Immigrants and Taxes,” The Atlantic (September 12, 2016)
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