> it's still a major problem if we have social security recipients with no birth date in the system.
It's not a problem, since there are other ways of determining eligibility. If a person doesn't have proof of a birth date, what are you supposed to do? Make one up?
And the claim is that it's fraud, which requires evidence, not some anomaly which can be several things. Musk and DOGE deserve the "dunk" since they're spreading unsubstantiated BS.
If a person doesn't have proof of birthdate, you could make up a realistic one. Pick 1935. Pick 1942. Pick anything but longer than the oldest human to ever live ago. And you know what? Since centenarians are rare enough, maybe do annual checkups on those folks to see if they're still alive before cutting checks.
Absolutely not. You don't enter false values pretending to be accurate, you put in a null value or other marker. You want it to make no sense so it's not mistaken for real data.
Exactly wrong making up fake data would poison actual data. The pupose of these systems isn't to look correct to people on twitter. We have zero reason to believe we are cutting checks unreasonably inaccurately.
There are of course going to be recently decreased not yet accounted for and a tiny number of fraudsters collecting grannies check.
Individual annual audits 200 USD per person would cost 136B over the next 10 years. Far more than fraud it would deter. Fraud which is already minimal.
Indivual audits of client accounts for obvious issues and fraud is already a thing because the experts that are responsible for such aren't complete morons.
Why would you deliberately input realistic but known incorrect data, versus using a special “we don’t know” value? How on earth could that possibly be better?
It's not a problem, since there are other ways of determining eligibility. If a person doesn't have proof of a birth date, what are you supposed to do? Make one up?
And the claim is that it's fraud, which requires evidence, not some anomaly which can be several things. Musk and DOGE deserve the "dunk" since they're spreading unsubstantiated BS.