Hi,

We got married few weeks ago and recently went to Social Security office to change my wife's last name on her social security card. The clerk run her I-94 number through their database and said there was a problem with it - someone else's name came up under this number. So they said they will have to verify my wife's status with USCIS before issuing a new Social Security card. Does anyone know how long this usually takes? 2 weeks? 2 month?

Thank you!

I've never heard of an I 94 coming up in someone else's name. When did she enter the US?

She came on November 30th.

I'm going to have to defer to our resident SSN expert, I Quit, on this one. I'm stumped!

I thought maybe she hadn't been here long enough to be in their system yet - obviously that is not the case.

It's possible that her or another person's I-94 number could have been keyed incorrectly by immigration or the person in the SSA office might have entered it wrong when doing the verification.

Regardless, the SSA office is just supposed to send a secondary electronic verification request if the initial SAVE query doesn't verify. Now if immigration did in fact enter the I-94 number incorrectly, I would figure on the response from the secondary electronic verification request to be a request to see a copy of the I-94 and a G-845 being sent.

What is G-845? I assume the SSA will contact us and request a copy of her I-94 and G-845 in case the secondary verification does not go through? I has been over a week and we have not heard back from them yet...

It's a form sent to immigration to request verification of status. Did they accept the SSN application? If they did you should have a reference number that starts with 08. If they accepted the application I would assume they would or should have made a copy of the I-94.

They did accept the application and made a copy of her I-94. They said it will take 2-4 weeks for them to verify her status. I am just concerned that if indeed her I-94 number was entered incorrectly, would it cause any problems with AOS process which we have not filed yet? I guess will wait until it is 3 weeks from the date we filed for a new social security card and then we will try to follow up...

Something dawned on me after I replying, since this is for a name change it seems to me if something was incorrectly entered into the SAVE database, why wasn't there a problem with the original application. That makes me wonder if the person in the SSA office didn't enter the wrong number.

Shouldn't affect the AOS, since you have to send a copy of the I-94 and the petition approval that has her A# and that's more important in identifying her that the I-94 number. Plus I suspect the SAVE data isn't connected to other databases.

My wife was in the US two years ago on a J1 visa. She got her original SSN at that time, so it was a different I-94 two years ago. Thank you for all your help, we will see in a week or so if there is a problem. If she gets her social security card in the mail then it means they were able to resolve the problem.