Can we sue if the hospital where our son was born applied for a SSN for him but we didn’t want one nor did we sign any paperwork for one?
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Can we sue if the hospital where our son was born applied for a SSN for him but we didn’t want one nor did we sign any paperwork for one?
We told them that we didn’t want one for our new born son, however someone filed for one without our consent. They also forged the birth papers to say that he was born at the hospital when he was a home birth with no medical doctor to deliver him.
Asked on April 7, 2017 under Malpractice Law, Georgia
Answers:
SJZ, Member, New York Bar / FreeAdvice Contributing Attorney
Answered 7 years ago | Contributor
How was your son or you "injured" by him having a SSN? Having an SSN makes many benefits and many commercial activities available to him which otherwise would be difficult, if not impossible, to do. The only way someone is hurt by having an SSN is that it makes it harder for them to avoid taxes--but the law will not give you compensation for added difficulty in violating the law (everyone in this country has to file tax returns and, if they earn enough, pay taxes).
The law does not provide compensation for every violation of rights: compensation is only provided for reasonably foreseeable or predictable, provable (by at least a preponderance of the evidence), and quantifiable damages or losses. If a violation's consequences could not be foreseen, cannot be sufficiently proven, and/or cannot be reduced to a number or amount supported by evidence, it is not compensable. In addition, if the adverse impacts are not legal--e.g., hypothetically, the impact is an impairment if the ability to skirt legal obligations--there is also no compensation. Therefore, the issue of whether an SSN is necessary is, for purposes of a potential lawsuit, actually secondary, since it is extremely difficult to see how an entitlement to compensation could be shown or sufficiently proven in court.
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