That's one advantage of the US' 1950s paper-based approach to everything, or at least as it was 20-odd years ago. As a non-US citizen I opened a bank account with barely any ID (no drivers license or phone number), they gave me a box of paper cheques that I had to look up online to figure out how to use because I had no idea what to do with them, I got an SSN (still not quite sure how I managed that), filed IRS tax returns, and somehow got a complete US identity and whatnot set up which seemed to be based mostly on the fact that everything was built around paper records and no-one talked to anyone else about what they had on file.