I went through all of our older welder's certs and edited them....They all now have the welder's intials and the last 4 digits, and all future certs were filled out with only that info in place of the SS#'s. I drafted a letter to "whom it may concern" explaining why some of the welder's certs have the SS# scratched out, all but the last 4 digits....I also initialled and dated the change on each cert. I would have rather used just the employee's clock#, but we had so many older certs that I hated to go back and redo all of them.
My view on this changed several years back when I went to visit the jobsite and was told to sit here and wait, "so and so" will be out in a minute or two. As I waited, I noticed that our company welding submittal was laying right there on this desk as you enter the job trailer....it was laying out where anybody sitting and waiting like I was could pick it up and browse through it....