How would you feel if an investigation stalled when a bank said “we have no idea who these people are, or where the money went”?
Any time someone attempts to use your SSN to identify themselves as you, you should be notified and your authorization should be required for that use to be allowed.
And the higher the value of the authorization, the more care should be required.
Companies are able to do this already with 2 factor authentication. And I think we SORT of have that for change of address, as the Post Office both requires ID and notifies you by mail. Maybe that's really just one factor.
Allow people to require as many additional factors as they want. Confirming my identity in 6 ways when I decide to sell my house sounds good. 4 ways when I buy a car. One or none is fine when I make a $10 purchase. Let me decide.
And let them CHOOSE what organization manages authentication. A private company might do the job a lot more effectively than the Post Office.
Add human methods too. A call from a sibling or child might be one people could set up. Require validation by a notary public.
So now the government needs a way of contacting you. Suppose they have your address and phone number on file.
Then you lose your way a while and become homeless for two years. You can't afford a phone and no longer have the same address, and have lost your ID or it expired. You finally start to turn it around and go to open a bank account. The government contacts you how? How do they know it's you?
The answer is that it's a new account and you're not trying to prove anything about whether you're the same person who lived at the old address, so you shouldn't have to.
And once you have a bank account or a mortgage or such, you and the bank can arrange for any form(s) of authentication you like. It shouldn't have anything to do with the government, and it definitely shouldn't have anything to do with how you authenticate yourself to your job or your wireless carrier.
But the rest sounds plain wrong to me.
Your phone might get stolen, your name might change due to marriage, your address might change because you moved/got evicted. What now?
If someone steals your phone and password and bank card and ability to receive mail at your home address all at once then you're pretty screwed, but you're pretty screwed then regardless, right? That's the level of screwed where somebody else can also get a government ID in your name.
And in fact, for poor people, anything that might engage their entire savings might also benefit from a more advanced identity verification.
For example my stock exchange account just takes a password. It’s a scandal.
This might work better than your proposal before.
For example
123 Main St. Apt 45-WXYZ
Where "WXYZ" is different for each business, to pollute any data mining algorithms trying to collate my address across sites. In some cases when they use address resolving functions, it also helps to spell out your address e.g.
123 Main St. Apt FOURTY_FIVE WXYZ
Now, there is absolutely no reason it could not be OTP'd (or uniquely derived for each account).
Then there is no "your social security number" or "your identity" for someone to open a bank account against. You open a bank account and they give you a bank card and you set an address and phone number. The day you open it, they shouldn't need to know who you are, because it's a new account with $0 in it. After that, the owner of the account is the person with that bank card who can be reached at the address and phone number given when the account was created.
Get rid of centralized identity and there is no centralized identity to steal.