Numberholders Age 100 or Older
Who Did Not Have Death
Information on the Numident
> The attached final report presents the results of the Office of Audit’s review. The objective was
to determine whether the Social Security Administration had effective controls to annotate death
information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life
expectancies.
Please provide within 60 days a corrective action plan that addresses each recommendation. If
you wish to discuss the final report, please call me or have your staff contact
Michelle L. Anderson, Assistant Inspector General for Audit
They decided not to do anything about it (e.g. add a "presumed dead" field) because they thought it would be a waste of money!
> In response to our 2015 report, SSA considered multiple options, including adding presumed
death information to these Numident records. SSA ultimately decided not to proceed because
the “. . . options would be costly to implement, would be of little benefit to the agency, would
largely duplicate information already available to data exchange consumers and would create
cost for the states and other data exchange partners.”16 SSA also believed a regulation would
be required to allow it to add death information to these records, and adding presumed death
information to the Numident would increase the risk of inadvertent release of living individuals’
personal information in the DMF.
Submitted here in case anyone wants to discuss the SHOCKINGLY boring REVELATIONS contained within:
I think it's worth reading both the 2015 OIG report on the topic ("Title: Numberholders Age 112 or Older Who Did Not Have a Death Entry on the Numident", A-06-14-34030) and also the 2023 followup you submitted. I left a comment over on that submission after reading both.
It's nice that the hard work of investigating government inefficiency is being noticed and celebrated -- you can really see the tensions between providing reliable services and fighting fraud risk in the 2015 & 2023 reports.
If you care about finding waste, it seems like a really strange choice to summarily fire the inspectors general who have worked hard on this sort of investigation.
Thanks for sharing. This is what I expected -- of course somebody already looked at it, did the math and decided to not do anything, which was the most reasonable thing.
https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident
> The attached final report presents the results of the Office of Audit’s review. The objective was to determine whether the Social Security Administration had effective controls to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies. Please provide within 60 days a corrective action plan that addresses each recommendation. If you wish to discuss the final report, please call me or have your staff contact Michelle L. Anderson, Assistant Inspector General for Audit
They decided not to do anything about it (e.g. add a "presumed dead" field) because they thought it would be a waste of money!
> In response to our 2015 report, SSA considered multiple options, including adding presumed death information to these Numident records. SSA ultimately decided not to proceed because the “. . . options would be costly to implement, would be of little benefit to the agency, would largely duplicate information already available to data exchange consumers and would create cost for the states and other data exchange partners.”16 SSA also believed a regulation would be required to allow it to add death information to these records, and adding presumed death information to the Numident would increase the risk of inadvertent release of living individuals’ personal information in the DMF.
Submitted here in case anyone wants to discuss the SHOCKINGLY boring REVELATIONS contained within:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077199