„Social Security isn’t paying out to 150-year-olds, it’s paying out to people whose birthdays we don’t even know“ is not exactly reassuring.
How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing? How is it possible that SSNs aren’t unique? I can’t come up with an explanation that doesn’t boil down to either negligence or fraud.
You ask in effect: 'How is it that a data collection
- whose cardinality is well into the hundreds of millions, likely close to half a billion (500,000,000);
- which has been maintained for now just about exactly a hundred years;
- which predates birth certificates and birth records being common across large swaths of the country (not predates their systematization or encoding, but predates their reliable existence);
- which for a lot of its history has been maintained by hand,
should come to have occasional inconsistencies?'
So framed in knowledge of the Social Security Administration's history, I confide the question may reveal its own answer.
But it also seems to fine to say "we aren't paying out any more money for any inconsistent records till the person comes forward and gives us the info to fix the records".
Obviously, if such a thing is done at scale, you need to have the staff to handle all the phone calls etc in a timely manner.
Until what? The person produces records that don't exist?
Someone born in a cabin in the middle of the woods 90 years ago is not neccesarily going to have "info" to fix their birth records (especially if non religious, so there are no church records). They could give you a date, but they aren't going to be in a position to prove it.
Just to bring up a parallel, there was a influx of migration from the Caribbean to Britain between 1948 and 1970. These people were wanted and welcomed. A large proportion were children. The only records of their identity were held on paper by the UK government. They were called the Windrush generation, because the earliest of them crossed the ocean on HMT Empire Windrush.
The UK government then LOST their paper records.
In 2018, under the "hostile environment policy" set by Theresa May, the UK government started legally threatening these immigrants, and asked them to prove their settled status -- despite that same government having lost the only records that could prove that. The government then tried sending some "home" to countries they'd barely seen as a child and had zero family or friends in, and zero prospects.
> The March 2020 independent Windrush Lessons Learned Review, conducted by the inspector of constabulary Wendy Williams, concluded that the Home Office had shown "ignorance and thoughtlessness" and that what had happened had been "foreseeable and avoidable".
Ignorance and thoughtlessness. Foreseeable and avoidable. Does that sound similar to what's happening today?
I assume if social security is being paid and being spent, someone has the ability to manage a bank account, and that person then has a bank account, and the bank has collected enough kyc info to satisfy this correct? If not, at least there is a person on the other side that is mentally able to verify their identity.
You do a lot of assuming for people who clearly have never dealt with that sort of things.
Crazy how people will believe the weirdest customer service stories (and have no problem relating because we've all been in a kafkaesque situation) but the second they can bash "the administration and civil servants" or "random people who get a little bit of help and are NOT me", all of that goes out the window and things are supposed to be perfect and run smoothly.
> not, at least there is a person on the other side that is mentally able to verify their identity.
That wasn't the question though. There could be this verified identity, good paper trail, bank records for decades etc. And still exact date of birth can be unknown and unknowable. Data lost to the mists of time.
You are going to demand that these very old, often suffering from dementia, strokes, Alzheimer’s, etc… Americans go out to the state capital to defend their existence in front of a literal death panel? If they get their benefits cut off they die.
Old people vote. There is no way Congress goes along with a scheme like this.
In which case you review the details they can provide, and if it looks likely legit you re-enable it.
However if their name is "bobby tables" and their date of birth is 35th January 1806, and their only proof of that is a handwritten note with star signs, you disable it till either more proof is provided or a court makes a final decision.
Meanwhile here in the real world, when the US government arbitrarily refuses to honor its agreements - obligations it has in good faith entered into, and which no other party first violated - the dollar cracks. Only a very stupid American (or Englishman) wants that. I concede there are many very stupid Americans (and Englishmen) to the fore just now. They are sadly no less stupid for such prominence.
You do realise that the amount of "fraud" being discovered barely registers as a rounding error, right? That there is no significant amount being "wasted" here, right?
And none of that is about government efficiency or "saving money". Right?
Now that Elon has discovered all that fraud, how is the economy working out for you? How is the price of eggs doing? Have you finally become a millionaire now that all this red tape is gone? When is it supposed to happen? Why aren't you rich yet?
back in the 1920s and 30s it wasn't uncommon for people to be born at home and social security numbers wouldn't have been obtained at birth because there were no social security numbers yet.
In some cases data of birth is uncertain e.g. summer of 1934 or 35. IN such cases any written record is likely to be at least unofficial and more than likely non-existent.
I'm confident they don't just pay someone if their data is inconsistent; the database is not the only source of truth.
The next question then becomes, how much does it cost to fix these inconsistencies? I'm also 99% confident that there's a small army of people that work to do so already, that is, fix and work with and around the inconsistencies.
> which predates birth certificates and birth records being common across large swaths of the country
All true, but you underestimate severity of the problem by a large margin if you assume that it is confined to the USA, a fairly affluent and bureaucratically stable country.
People in USA databases aren't necessarily born in the USA. Refugees by definition don't come from situations with stability.
" large swaths of the country" -> Internal to the country. it's worse, it's not purely an internal problem.
I mean that people in USA databases aren't necessarily born in the USA. That the USA's record-keeping is better than many countries. And that many people go to the USA because of instability that is incompatible with good record-keeping. Same with UK, EU or any other western country.
Western culture makes more of a persons "Birthday" than some others.
That's not what he's asking. He's asking why there apparently isn't a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation, assuming that's the issue.
Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud.
> That's not what he's asking. He's asking why there apparently isn't a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation, assuming that's the issue.
If that's what he was trying to ask, then I have, as detailed above, some notes on the attempt. But the myth that Social Security numbers were ever designed to work even half-assedly well as a single national ID number will never die, I suppose.
> Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud.
I can't really evaluate Newman's preprint [1] with much confidence, but it's only been out since September, and the Ig Nobel isn't peer review. Given also that the US state with the largest count of "supercentennarians" in Newman's data, Iowa, has a whopping 37 [2] of them, you're stretching this piece of un-peer-reviewed research far past anything it could reasonably be asked to support - hence, I suspect, the "are now believed" passive-voice weaseling in your claim quoted above.
[2] As given "1.25e-05" (p. 5, ibid.) or 12.5 per million, for a population just over three million. I've taken the liberty of rounding down on the assumption we are not meant to be counting fractional supercentennarians.
SSNs were designed to act as a national ID number for the purposes of the social security system. It's in the name. Why are you describing this as a "myth"? Do you think the people who designed that system sat down and said, right boys, how can we half-ass this?
Peer review hardly means anything in these sorts of fields but seeing as you asked, the same guy has previously published peer-reviewed papers on fraud in Blue Zones research. Here's a press release with some references:
> Dr Newman has previously disproved a 2016 study published in Nature on extreme-age research that accidentally rounded off a substantial amount of its data to zero. His peer-reviewed paper demonstrated that if corrected, this error eliminated the core findings claiming that human lifespan had a defined limit. Then, Dr Newman also countered a 2018 paper which made the opposite claim and, in the process, demonstrated a theoretical result predicting that patterns in old-age data are likely to be dominated by errors.
In investigating this theory, Dr Newman demonstrated fundamental and comedic mismatches between longevity claims and observed patterns. In the process, Dr Newman revealed that the well-publicised “Blue Zones” claims for the secrets of longevity are infallibly flawed.
Dr Newman showed that the highest rates of achieving extreme old age are predicted by high poverty, the lack of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds. Poverty and pressure to commit pension fraud were shown to be excellent indicators of reaching ages 100+ in a way that is ‘the opposite of rational expectations’.
>a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation
I understood GP as saying that this data is the best, cleanest data available. If nothing better exists, then record what you have. If that means some fields are blank, well then they're blank - you'll have to deal with this for country-sized databases, one way or another.
But mostly given that the primary condition for receiving social security is age, it doesn't inspire confidence that they are making payment without having any age data.
They probably do have reasonabke checks in place, likely done manually when applying. Just because the computer doesn't have it in a searchable database doesn't mean the system as a whole doesnt know
I obviously can't know why, but apparently the system allows to keep receiving benefits without the date being present in the database and maybe even claim benefits without the date being present, which is why.
Maybe the data was there initially, but was deleted or lost for technical reasons, for example the date was incomplete, e.g. only the year of birth was known, but not the exact day and then was dropped to null as invalid during some kind of upgrade.
Maybe the data was not possible to enter into the system for technical reasons -- somebody didn't have access, something was down, the next shift was supposed to enter it once the system was back up. Maybe the same, but for process reasons, for example setting the date requires attaching the birth certificate and the birth certificate is lost.
Maybe the data was intended to be entered, but somebody forgot to actually do it, was waiting for birth certificate to be produced, but approved the benefits provisionally.
Maybe the birth certificate was shown to the official, but was of the wrong kind (handwritten extract, foreign document without consular legalization, damaged, illegible or incomplete date), so it was legit enough to start paying benefits but not legit enough to upload to the server. Maybe the date was conflicting with other records somehow. Maybe there was a court decision involved which determined eligibility for benefits but didn't determine exact date of birth.
The key point here -- the system allows for this kind of inconsistency (benefits are being paid, but the date is not present) and relies on a human process to eventually reach a consistent state, but the process failed and nobody really cares to rectify it as long as benefits are being paid.
That's assuming the benefits are actually paid to those people and the organization is not aware of this data issue and not investigating those people for fraud right now.
In an organization big enough there is always this kind of stuff happening (see "seeing like a bank"), which is tolerated as long as statutory task is not compromised.
This still seems bad to me because the SSA should not be concerned with actual DOB, only DOB for the purposes of SS benefits. This will be actual verified DOB in the vast majority of cases, but we are talking about edge cases here. If the SSA determines, by whatever procedure, that someone is eligible for retirement benefits (meaning that they are determined to be over 65), it is incredibly sloppy not to insert some DOB in the SS DB.
Of course it's sloppy to not have any date in the DB. The thing is -- we don't know why exactly it happened and what kind of procedure they follow or don't. Maybe there is a scan of the certificate somewhere and it's illegible and nobody cares, because it's not a problem really. Benefits are mostly being paid to people eligible and any effort to achieve better quality will waster more money than is lost to fraud. That's of course triggering every autistas mind, but so what?
It could also be that entries in the DB that are complete are not exactly correct or even belong to real people and of course there is fraud and corruption going on at least somewhere.
The cost benefit calculation is, of course, reasonable. But there are 2 things that need to happen here.
1. Run a complex process requiring human intervention to determine age where it is hard to determine
2. Enter the result of step 1 in the DB
And it's pretty obvious that 99.99% of the cost of this is coming from step 1. So I find it completely implausible that just tracking the results here, when a single error could potentially result in a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars, is not cost effective.
> social security fraud is a major problem in many countries
It is not a major problem, it is a minor problem blown completely out of proportions by right-wing propaganda to cover much bigger problems caused by power-grabbing, tax-evading plutocracy.
> a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation
What would that process look like assuming you are e.g. trying to establish a DOB of a person born long time ago in a country that does not exist anymore under wartime conditions? Would that be cost effective?
I'm not worried about Social Security knowing if everyone in their DB is alive or not. I am only worried about dead people still receiving funds. How many of those 20 million are receiving funds?
If someone is marked alive incorrectly and is not receiving funds, I do not care if that data is bad. It's not ideal, but it's not an actual problem.
Yes, the issue is if there is social security fraud, not if someone is incorrectly filed as alive. We will see how much of it was fraudulent once the suspicious database entries have been investigated.
Here's how to tell, far easier: take the number of people receiving checks in that age bracket. From what I read, it was 44,000 ish, but I can't verify that. If it's not - it's still going to be a number far less than 20 million.
Do all those people have correct data? If not, correct that. If they do, then there's no fraud.
And even after that, even if the data is incorrect, it doesn't mean there's fraud. You have to go case by case to check if they're actually being collected and not just sitting somewhere.
So .. yes. There's potential for fraud, but we're not going to (accurately) know about the scale for a long time, and it's definitely not going to be on the scale of 20 million recipients.
> How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing?
It might not be missing, it also can be unknown and unknowable. There are people with their date of birth not recorded or recorded only approximately. It happens when the date is recorded on a piece of a paper in a building that then burns down or during natural or human-made catastrophes. Or it might not be recorded at all, or only some parts are missing (like the day of the month). Working for a different public administration, it's so common we have a special date type for that.
Or a definitely wrong value was removed but there's nothing to correct it with.
For example, if someone was registered with a birth date of 02/18/1458, or has a birth certificate with that on it. Bear in mind that humans make mistakes, and the people who issue birth certificates or type them up are humans. 02/18/1458 is patently wrong, but what do you do? Just guess that someone misread a 9 as a 4? What if the person in front of you is clearly too young (or old) to have been born in 1958?
You can't just revoke someone's social security because someone screwed up.
> How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing?
This is a weird question. How would you even go about finding out an unknown date of birth? Especially when it happened > 50 years ago and half the world away.
For whom is it "vital" ? Will it prevent me from going about my daily business?
See also: Why are so many people born on the 1st of January? It's a statistically impossible number.
A: Because they know their approximate year of birth, only.
I know a few people that don't have an official birth date. My brother in law is Papuan and no one in his village has an official birth year or date since they just don't keep track of it, so when he got his first official government ID at a much later stage of his life, he chose an arbitrary date cause it means nothing to him. He's probably around 35-40, but his birthday says he's in his 60s.
It's not all that rare even in the West, especially for older people. Records get lost or never get collected in the first place.
You think it is not possible that people born in homesteads in the 1920s and 1930s in rural and isolated communities don’t have birth records? Or immigrants from countries that didn’t have paper birth records?
My grandmother was born in the 1930s in Chicago (second most populous US city at the time) and she never even knew exactly what year she was born in. It’s fairly common.
I don't know how it happens in the US, but in France, during several years, I had an error-code SSN. My papers had been misfiled at birth, due to the unreadable writing of the cleric who recorded my birth, and it took 2-3 years to fix this.
This error-code SSN was full of 0s, so obviously shared with others.
I wouldn't be surprised if some migrants waiting for confirmation of paperwork also had some shared temporary special-code SSN.
Yeah, who's ever heard of an incomplete database or a database that barely holds together and has had to have weird adjustments done to it in order to avoid fucking up other bits of data?
We can tell you've never touched a database or worked in tech.
Not that there is any shame in that. But the same way I keep my opinion to myself when my doctor gives me my diagnosis, people who have never handled a database really should follow that advice.
A local library can barely keep its database straight and it's very slightly easier than a database containing millions of people's information. Dozens of millions.
How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing? How is it possible that SSNs aren’t unique? I can’t come up with an explanation that doesn’t boil down to either negligence or fraud.