Part of the ‘myth of government inefficiency’, one of those known problems that was known (and it’s not limited to the DOD).
From the Inspector General of the SSA in 2023:
"SSA has not established controls to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies. SSA added death information to the Numident records of approximately 1.5 of the 6.5 million numberholders age 112 or older discussed in our 2015 report.
DB2
You might want to read beyond the first paragraph of the report before writing your misleading thread title.
Also from the report (page 7 of the report, page 12 of the PDF):
We acknowledge that almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.
So the Social Security payments to those who exceed maximum reasonable life expectancies are negligible.
Now before you accuse me of saying that nothing needs to be done, I do believe these records should be investigated and corrected as needed. But that involves giving the SSA some budget money to do that work. Since this issue was first identified by the Inspector General in 2015, Congress has failed to provide funding to do this work.
Of course, the largest problem is not the SSA paying out benefits to deceased individuals. It is these numbers being used to obtain employment. Here’s another nugget from the report:
In Tax Years 2016 through 2020, employers and individuals reported approximately $8.5 billion in wages, tips, and self-employment income using 139,211 SSNs assigned to individuals age 100 or older.
That would result in over $1 billion dollars of social security taxes collected.
–Peter
The info to analyze the real situation is missing, for some reason that makes no sense. Wages are pretty easy to determine. Duplicate SSNs? No idea, but (again) no info provided. Self-employment? No info (again).
I would expect no inquiry into questionable money coming in to the system, only inquiry into money going out.
Steve
I think we know illegals often use borrowed documents. Certainly these situations should be looked into.
“Thinking we know” and actually knowing are two very different things.
Yes.
The opening had me when it said that in eight years since the 2015 report less than a quarter of the cases had added death information.
DB2
The point is the premise is more than an assumption. Reviewing suspected cases would be fruitful. Address changes such as moving back to Mexico or South and Central America might in a few cases be a clue.
Paying in only from an older age is suspect. We are not in a period where housewives en mass go to work at age 35 with no prior history on farms doing manual labor.
Remember the argument that Mexican workers had paid in and deserve the payout? But at age 112?
There is already an established protocol when the same SSN is used by two or more workers. The employer(s) must fix the problem based on the employee and getting the proper documents. Otherwise, ICE, etc.
In case you have yet to read this:
Musk, much like Trump, appears to have mastered this bit of misdirection*. Make an outrageous claim that is untrue with no supporting evidence, and then let the media try and disprove them wrong - too many news cycles later for them masses to follow, or care.
*See “They’re eating the dogs.”
COBOL has a date type. It is done by having a secondary program run against the other programs. It is rudimentary but exists. It actually does not need fixing. But Silicon Valley wants more and more paydays.
Wired Mag? I doubt the author has worked in a COBOL shop. Or the F500 then by extension.
The O in COBOL for “object” has data on when people enter the system. It has data on all the payouts etc…
BTW AI does not work. At least not as intended. COBOL does work as intended. Salesmen do not see it that way.
Is antiquated govt IT equipment another part of this? What is being done to resolve this problem? Recall that Covid case data was often reported by fax.
The new IT equipment is worse.
Are they still running vacuum tubes? Or have they upgraded to transistors?
Absolutely.
What is being done? What is NOT being done is Congress appropriating the money to update computer systems.
That opinion is based on what? The last guys were spending money. TI is not spending money. He is upgrading on a zero budget.
I think you pretty much nailed the issue in the above sentences from your post.
What we have is a bunch of excess SSNs from deceased being used by the undocumented to get a job for which they pay SS taxes.
So the “problem” is resulting in more money going into the SS system.
I can understand why there isn’t a whole lot of motivation to fix this particular “problem”.
There are many instances in any organization where the cost of the “cure” is substantially greater than the loss from the “disease”. A company could install an elaborate security system to prevent employees from stealing company pens. But is it worth it?
It’s probably not antiquated equipment. Government agencies are required to update computer hardware every five years just for security update reasons. The problem is antiquated software and the cost of shifting a massive database like SS to a new system. It would be like having the biggest company in the world convert from Peoplesoft to SAP.
I shudder to think about it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with using COBOL for business critical applications. There are approximately 60 million lines of COBOL code being used by the department, and migrating that to a new language would be extremely costly, time consuming, and fraught with peril. Besides, COBOL systems like this are known for being highly reliable. This is not a problem that needs resolving.
Guess who will tell us it is a problem and needs to be fixed…
My feeling is everyone is focused on the wrong “problem”.
The real problem isn’t government inefficiency, it is government vulnerability. Suppose China decides to invade Taiwan and to distract America it hires anonymous third parties to launch a cyber attack that erases SS electronic records. Seems pretty plausible.
Furthermore, quantum computing has the potential of making all current electronic security systems obsolete. If the bad guys get there first…When a Quantum Computer Is Able to Break Our Encryption, It Won't Be a Secret | RAND
This is the nature of technology. No tech-based security system is safe from better tech. And there will always be better tech.
The only long-term solution that I can see is to move backwards. SS should go back to the paper record system used in the 1960s. Yes, it will be slower and less efficient. OTH it creates a lot of non-STEM human jobs in an economy that will be rapidly adopting robots and AI.