Process for Employment of Foreign Nationals without Permanently Assigned Social Security Numbers

David Colburn, Provost

As you may have read in the news media, the Social Security Administration (SSA) is cooperating with INS to insure that all foreign nationals are legally present in the country. The effect of this process on the University of Florida is that many of our newly arriving graduate assistants will not be assigned a social security number for up to 20 weeks. It is our hope that the assignment will not take this long. The Bureau of State Payrolls (BSOP) has been very cooperative and has allowed the University to submit a University assigned taxpayer ID for payroll purposes. This will allow us to pay these employees in a timely manner once they have gotten a receipt from the SSA that they have applied for a SSN.

I ask you to have your staff follow-up and notify the appropriate personnel office when your employees receive their permanent SSN. It is extremely important that this is done to reduce the workload on the Finance and Accounting and BOSP in their tax reporting duties in January 2003.

The process for employment of foreign nationals without permanently assigned social security numbers can be found on the Academic Personnel Web site at http://www.aa.ufl.edu/aa/aapers.

If you have any questions, please contact Lynn Frazier at 392- 5323, ext. 502 ( lfrazier@ufic.ufl.edu ) in the International Center.