The two South Korean immigrants whose new lives in America were thrown into chaos after they were mistakenly assigned the same Social Security number are getting some relief from the federal government.
Less than a week after NBC News reported on their plight, the Social Security Administration announced that it will allow Jieun Kim of Los Angeles, 31, to keep the number that she was assigned in 2018, and give Jieun Kim, who lives in a Chicago suburb and is also 31, a brand new number.
“I am glad and relieved that the SSA has resolved the problem of having issued one Social Security number to both of us,” the L.A. Kim told NBC News on Tuesday.
The Kim who lives outside of Chicago, in Evanston, said she, too, was elated after hearing from the SSA.
“The first thought that came to me was, ‘What a relief,’” she said. “Finally, SSA as a government agency is officially listening to me and taking my situation seriously.”
Jeff Nesbit, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, confirmed that one of the women will be assigned a new social security number and that their personal information and income histories, which were once combined under the same number, have now been separated.
“The agency moved quickly to resolve it once both cases were brought to our attention,” Nesbit said. “Part of the agency’s mission is to resolve cases such as this.”
The Chicagoland Kim, who is a doctoral student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University and works there as a teaching assistant, said she was preparing for a class when she heard from the director of the SSA office in Evanston, a woman she has dealt with before.
“To be honest when I picked up the phone and found out that it was from the Social Security agency, I kind of panicked and even got a little scared fearing that something went wrong,” she said.
But the director called with the news that a new Social Security card with a new number had been issued…
Read the full article here
