That's ingenuoua. He posted the ssa's process for culling 115 year olds above. Also, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Presently, there is no evidence.
This is precisely why business and government are different entities. Business is a wealth-creating opportunity with less responsibility. Government may not be low-latency, but its aim is to be responsible and correct. Confusing the two is a major problem.
What was the claim? That there are millions of people above 120 years old in the SS database that aren't marked dead? That doesn't sound extraordinary, or a claim that's hard to challenge by even past employees that had access to the data. but all we got is propaganda and FUD.
Presumably in the SS database. Is your idea that he should give everyone on the internet access to this database? Because other than seeing it for yourself, I'm not sure what evidence he can provide that you will believe.
More than zero would be a start. You said it's not viable to give evidence of claims during a press conference, okay, but it's been a while since then.
His team ran a query and shared the results. How is that zero? What do you expect him to provide? Litterally NOBODY is arguing that the results aren't accurate based on data other than an, easily verifiable, erroneous claim about the COBOL platform or "mUsK SAiD iT"
In fact, if you read that document, it mentions there are exceptions in which the automated process doesn't terminate someone for being >115, and the termination has to be done manually for:
> Beneficiaries with other claimants active on the record;
> Dually or technically entitled beneficiaries with a discrepancy among records (information pertaining to date of birth (DOB), suspension, and termination; or
> Beneficiaries in an active pay status on a dually entitled record.
What we don't know, is how many >115 records get pushed to manual processing, and how efficient that processing is. Is there a backlog? How big is it?
It mentions that one thing that can prevent the automated process, is when they have multiple records for a person, and they have conflicting dates of birth – and then they have to follow some process to resolve the discrepancy. What happens if they get stuck and can't work out which date of birth is the right one?
It also mentions how in some cases they need proof of death to carry out the manual termination. What if their attempts to procure such proof are unsuccessful?
Speculation: maybe there are a cohort of individuals who are long deceased, but they fall into one of the exceptions to the automated termination at 115 process, SSA is missing proof of death, and if nobody is actually "cashing the checks", it might be administratively easier to just keep on "paying" them by printing the checks and then burying them at the back of a filing cabinet than to cancel their social security. Maybe that's who these "150 year old social security recipients" are. So nobody would actually be committing fraud, and the government isn't really losing any money (since the checks are never cashed). Not exactly good, but maybe not quite as bad as Musk et al make it sound either. And quite likely it is just a small handful of people who are a rounding error in the federal budget.
>...exceptions in which the automated process doesn't terminate someone for being >115
You gave a several good explanations about why the current automated processes don't mark the records as deceased. But those are excuses. Just because the design of the system is flawed, that doesn't mean the system isn't in error because the code implements the design.
All those sound like it needs to be fixed to me. As somebody that deals with data for large enterprises that are nowhere near, obviously, as the government, but definitely companies with 100k employees and several in the Fortune 20. It's rudimentary to:
- have a data staging area before data gets into any financial system intended for payment transactions. Those staging systems can be used for analytical, reporting, and especially data cleaning.
- No use one record to represent the obligations to a completely different records of the same type. i.e. overloaded corrupt master data.
Uncurated data systems should be treated completely differently than systems that actually impacts financial transactions. Just because it's taxpayer money, they shouldn't be able to avoid criticism because they're wasting the money. If anything they should be more accountable.
There has been an ongoing dispute between the SSA and its OIG about what to do about millions of dormant accounts for which SSA lacks a date of death. [0] SSA OIG views these accounts as a risk and wants them marked as presumed dead. SSA argues that it is unnecessary, that it would cost millions in administrative and IT costs for little real benefit, that there is a risk of accidentally marking living people as dead, and disagrees that it is a fraud risk since no benefits have been paid to these dormant accounts for many decades, and any attempt to “reactivate” one of them would be flagged as an anomaly and investigated as potential fraud. It would not surprise me if Musk’s claims of “150 year old social security recipients” turn out to be a distortion of this pre-existing debate. The distortion is in presenting these accounts as active cases of fraud, since the vast majority of them haven’t received benefits in decades, or never claimed them to begin with - they are mostly long-dead people who were registered with the SSA in the first few decades of its existence, but for whatever reason their death was never reported to the SSA (the processes for doing so were less effective decades ago and so the further back you go, the more deaths were “missed”)
