Why not just suspend payments if there is no traceable information of someone's personal activities - like credit card transactions - in some time, say a year, and then if the person is alive they just need to call a hotline if they stop getting payments, prove they are still alive, and have them reinstated?
Being in the database does not imply recieving money. Even being in the database and not marked dead does not imply that.
98% of the records discussed in this document are not receiving money from the SSA and the vast majority that are recieving money, are simply people over the age of 100 which is a thing that happens sometimes when you have a population of 350 million.
Basically it comes down to the cost of being wrong. If you decide that someone is dead and stop sending checks, you might learn otherwise when their congressional representatives or reporters start asking why you failed to perform your legally-mandated duties at great cost to the retiree. Mailing a check is a lot cheaper than getting in the hot seat because you cut off some disabled veteran’s rent.
Older people often have disabilities or care situations which make contact less reliable, they’re more likely to use cash or have relatives do their shopping, etc. so you’re left with relatively slow or expensive options like paying people to visit in person (which has all kinds of problems around privacy and access - Social Security has a legal obligation to serve someone who lives abroad, on a reservation without paved roads, etc.) and any other kind of verification system won’t help with fraud since people collecting their dead relative’s check can also fill out a form or answer a phone call fraudulently.
Tl;dr: There's a lot of garbage in the database, but it doesn't matter because a) no one trusts the data, b) no one's falsely getting the money. So they haven't done anything about it because cleaning up millions of PII records was too expensive. No one who has dealt with databases would be surprised that a database older than most people alive would be full of garbage.
I'm hoping this accurate information gets as much attention as the DOGE hysteria and rampant speculation that happened elsewhere, but I'm not holding my breath.
It was interesting to see that in the 2015 audit, a total of 13 people were found to have received Social Security benefits despite being older than the oldest known human.
It was also interesting to see that in the 2023 audit the costs questioned ended up being $0, i.e. there was less evidence of misdirected money, though in OIG's opinion strong evidence of an opportunity for fraud in other ways.
I think I understand why SSA might be reluctant to accept recommendations to bulk disable the SSNs of people who seem to be very old. If they get it wrong and a legitimate beneficiary had their benefits cut off because somebody typed in their birthday wrong, this could lead to bad press and a frustrating experience with Congressional constituent services.
Seems to me that it would be a perfectly reasonable policy choice to order SSA to implement the OIG's recommendations and take a more forceful approach to shutting down old SSNs. The odd thing here is that instead of doing that in 2025, the inspectors general were all laid off, and their recommendations about fraud are being gradually rediscovered from first principles, but without any of the institutional understanding of where the bad data come from and how to fix them.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] thread98% of the records discussed in this document are not receiving money from the SSA and the vast majority that are recieving money, are simply people over the age of 100 which is a thing that happens sometimes when you have a population of 350 million.
Older people often have disabilities or care situations which make contact less reliable, they’re more likely to use cash or have relatives do their shopping, etc. so you’re left with relatively slow or expensive options like paying people to visit in person (which has all kinds of problems around privacy and access - Social Security has a legal obligation to serve someone who lives abroad, on a reservation without paved roads, etc.) and any other kind of verification system won’t help with fraud since people collecting their dead relative’s check can also fill out a form or answer a phone call fraudulently.
- 2015: "Numberholders Age 112 or Older Who Did Not Have a Death Entry on the Numident", audit report A-06-14-34030 ( https://oig.ssa.gov/audit-reports/2015-03-06-audits-and-inve...)
- 2023: "Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident", audit report A-06-21-51022 ( https://www.oversight.gov/reports/audit/numberholders-age-10... )
It was interesting to see that in the 2015 audit, a total of 13 people were found to have received Social Security benefits despite being older than the oldest known human.
It was also interesting to see that in the 2023 audit the costs questioned ended up being $0, i.e. there was less evidence of misdirected money, though in OIG's opinion strong evidence of an opportunity for fraud in other ways.
I think I understand why SSA might be reluctant to accept recommendations to bulk disable the SSNs of people who seem to be very old. If they get it wrong and a legitimate beneficiary had their benefits cut off because somebody typed in their birthday wrong, this could lead to bad press and a frustrating experience with Congressional constituent services.
Seems to me that it would be a perfectly reasonable policy choice to order SSA to implement the OIG's recommendations and take a more forceful approach to shutting down old SSNs. The odd thing here is that instead of doing that in 2025, the inspectors general were all laid off, and their recommendations about fraud are being gradually rediscovered from first principles, but without any of the institutional understanding of where the bad data come from and how to fix them.
Just an odd and wasteful policy choice.