My mother was never given her correct social security number

Location: NY, USA

I truly thank in advance anyone who takes the time to read this situation.

I have been helping my mother with her bizarre social security number situation and currently still trying to get it resolved.

My parents moved to the US in 1993 and have since lived in NYC. She was given a SSN (let’s say it is 222) to use with the printed official card and everything. All these years she has been using this 222 number for taxes,employment and such as one would normally do. Around 2017, we started receiving letters from the IRS that they may have given her a SSN that is already in use and asked us to provide documentation of her identity. As we complied, years go on and we were never notified of any updates. We thought maybe this an identity theft situation.

Now that my mother is of retirement age and needs to claim benefits, you can see how there would be issues if the ssn 222 is being used by two different people. After a handful of visits to the Social Security Administration office, we learned that a women in Virginia is the original owner of the ssn 222. She has been an American citizen for much longer so it makes sense she keeps the 222 number. We have sent more documentations to open a case hoping to finally make progress of this situation. It’s frustrating but even more after what we learned from our last visit to SSA office.

This time luckily we had a more seasoned employee look into our case and found that my mother was originally supposed to have the ssn “111” instead of 222. BUT the 111 ssn is also being used by a woman in Washington DC so now my mother can’t use either 111 or 222 and needs a whole new SSN. The crazy part is that in the system all the information pertaining to that 111 ssn aligns with my mother’s information (name, her mother’s and father’s name, date of birth, hometown birth, etc) but the only discrepancy being my mother’s starting US residency date stating it was 1987 when it should be 1993.

We are currently in the process of resolving this and eventually getting her a new SSN but I can’t help to think how this negligence can be looked passed? Can this be some sort of lawsuit even though it would be against government entities? It just feels like this all should’ve been avoidable. We are the ones suffered with confusion and inconvenience.

Any tips,advices, or even realistic expectations is appreciated!