Some 100 people on public assistance will receive a letter soon and it won't contain good news. Instead, it will inform them for the first time that their children's Social Security numbers may have been misused.

The notification to the randomly selected people by the Department of Workforce Services comes after a new state law passed by lawmakers this year removed a prohibition on such notification.

There are roughly 20,000 people of all ages in the Workforce Services database who are potentially impacted by Social Security identity theft, according to the Utah Attorney General's Office.

The first batch of letters is targeting a sample of those who have children under age 14 with reported wages of more than $1,000 in the most recent quarter, said Curt Stewart, DWS spokesman. It's aimed at determining the scope of the problem and to make sure it's manageable.

The letters include information on how to access the Attorney General's Identity Theft Reporting System at www.idtheft.utah.gov.

"It could be legal. Children under age 14 do earn money," Stewart said. "They are people on our public assistance, and we want to alert them that there might be a problem."

If a child's Social Security number is misused, it often isn't discovered until he applies for credit in the form of a student loan or first car loan, said Richard Hamp, assistant attorney general. By then, someone else could have developed a years-long credit history.

"Anytime someone is a victim and they get on it early on, it helps," Hamp said. "If he's got someone else working on that number for 18 years, it's really going to appear that that (fraudulent) user is the real one."

Hamp said the idea of children as victims hit home during a mortgage fraud investigation.

"I had at least two, if not three of those victims who were kids," Hamp said. Investigators got together and thought maybe there was a way to approach the issue through Workforce Services.

However, when Workforce Services discovered the scope of the problem, the state agency also faced a dilemma. Agency employees were subject to one year in prison and a $2,500 fine for disclosing that information, Stewart said.

Sen. Carlene Walker, R-Cottonwood Heights, sponsored SB15, which the 2007 Legislature approved, to allow Workforce Services to notify individuals and law enforcement agencies when identity theft may be an issue.

"They felt frustrated, their hands were tied because they couldn't help people," Walker said. "Something needed to be done to help them disseminate the information."

Walker said the new law will help, but "this is a very small part" of an overarching issue that needs to be addressed by the federal government.

"This is the tip of the iceberg," she said. "A companion bill was a resolution to our elected (congressmen) to say somehow we've got to protect our Social Security numbers."

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E-mail: dbulkeley@desnews.com