I agree that looking into hashref is a great idea, especially if you have to create the select's option list later (i.e. you don't want to just create the option list while in the fetch loop).

my input to this would be to possibly find some other key than SSN, if you create this dropdown with SSN, a simple View Source will allow all users to capture all the others SSN. this can never be a good thing (unless perhaps you work for SSA and this is an app for internal use only :-)