"The agency has not established a new system to properly annotate death information in its database, which included roughly 18.9m social security numbers of people born in 1920 or earlier but were not marked as deceased. This does not mean, however, that these individuals were receiving benefits.
The agency decided not to update the database because of the cost to do so, which would run upward of $9m."
I feel like this game feels endless if folks just aren't curious and panic.
Yeah I got rows (or documents or whatever) in my database ... that's not bad, that could mean anything.
I don't prune DBs aggressively because that's dangerous, and honestly business logic covers things like "should do X,Y,Z" , not the existence of a row.
The birthdate in my SSA master record was wrong, and I discovered it only because the IRS upgraded their security (~10 years ago) and I could no longer file my taxes electronically - I couldn’t make it past the anti-fraud checks.
It took something like 2 years to track down the root cause (the SSA master record); the value they had stored looked a lot like a fat finger job by some data entry clerk back in the 1970s when I was born.
Fixing it took about 30 seconds at an actual SSA office building. I spent more time in the elevator.
Assuming everything in a computer is either correct or fraud is a terrible assumption when you are dealing with hundreds of millions of people in the real world.
Note also: "as of September 2015, the agency automatically stops payments to people who are older than 115 years old."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-social...
"The agency has not established a new system to properly annotate death information in its database, which included roughly 18.9m social security numbers of people born in 1920 or earlier but were not marked as deceased. This does not mean, however, that these individuals were receiving benefits.
The agency decided not to update the database because of the cost to do so, which would run upward of $9m."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-social...
Does it mean that they are definitely NOT receiving benefits, though?
It's addressed in a foot note:
It was mentioned earlier in the article there are 531 million SSN in the system total.
I feel like this game feels endless if folks just aren't curious and panic.
Yeah I got rows (or documents or whatever) in my database ... that's not bad, that could mean anything.
I don't prune DBs aggressively because that's dangerous, and honestly business logic covers things like "should do X,Y,Z" , not the existence of a row.
The birthdate in my SSA master record was wrong, and I discovered it only because the IRS upgraded their security (~10 years ago) and I could no longer file my taxes electronically - I couldn’t make it past the anti-fraud checks.
It took something like 2 years to track down the root cause (the SSA master record); the value they had stored looked a lot like a fat finger job by some data entry clerk back in the 1970s when I was born.
Fixing it took about 30 seconds at an actual SSA office building. I spent more time in the elevator.
Assuming everything in a computer is either correct or fraud is a terrible assumption when you are dealing with hundreds of millions of people in the real world.