Comment by BuyMyBitcoins

Comment by BuyMyBitcoins 3 days ago

I understand that these 140/150 year old recipients are actually the results of incomplete birthdate data.

To steelman the argument though, it seems reasonable to audit these recipients so that we can get their true birthdate entered. The number of recipients who lack a valid birthdate because they found a way to fraudulently claim benefits is likely non-zero, but probably low. But in any event, cleaning up the data can’t be a bad thing.

jghn 3 days ago

If something costs more to fix than it costs to leave sitting around, fixing it is less efficient. In this case it's already been investigated prior to DOGE, and deemed not worth the effort to clean up [1].

[1] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

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adolph 3 days ago

OIG Response:

  We acknowledge that almost none of the numberholders discussed in the 
  report currently receive SSA payments. However, SSA issued each of these 
  individuals a valid SSN and these SSNs could allow for a wide range of 
  potential abuse. 

  [...]

  We also note we initiated our 2015 review upon the receipt of information 
  that a man opened several bank accounts using SSNs belonging to 
  numberholders born in the 1800s who had no death information on the 
  Numident. In addition to being used to obtain employment or open bank 
  accounts, identity thieves can potentially use these SSNs to create 
  synthetic identifies, obtain credit, government benefits, or private 
  insurance.

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mbrumlow 3 days ago

You fix the system not because of the cost today but because the cost it will eventually cause.
Poor record keeping and bad policies about data validation tied to sending money to people if not today will eventually result in massive fraud.
Furthermore the notion you put forth is trash lazy thinking. Cost or no cost you do things the right way. But I don’t even buy you can calculate the cost of doing it wrong correctly to even have a sound conjecture that fixing it is more costly.

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- Brybry 3 days ago
  
  Your point is also covered in the audit report linked by the parent.
  Cost was not the only factor. They seem to be trying to handle missing data the right way rather than use a kludge.
  They did not want to add inaccurate death data to Numident records, for a variety of reasons, one being that it could cause release of information for living people when they're accidentally added to dead people records. The SSA also thought adding annotations would legally require a new regulation and would have impacts on other consumers of the data (ie. states, etc).
  How to handle missing death data in this case does not appear to have a clear and simple solution. But it also does not appear to be evidence of poor record keeping for modern records or a major cause of concern for "eventual massive fraud".
  
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  mbrumlow 3 days ago
  
  Missing data means == no payments until data is updated.
  This creates a driver, somebody who is motivated to get it fixed. If the person does not exist they won’t be calling for their check, or if the entry fraudulent, fraudster will run the risk of exposing them self in the process of trying to get the checks flowing again.
  
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- jf22 3 days ago
  
  But what if the right way is judging the pros and cons of perfection and doing what makes the most sense?
  
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rincebrain 3 days ago

I think the problem they should be considering more acutely is, eventually the number of people trained in that specialized knowledge will go to 0, and they will then be paying the cost to either train more (and the increased risks of less familiar people) or replace the whole thing with no backup plan.
Given the age of the COBOL programmers I know, that window is rapidly shrinking...

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milesvp 3 days ago

To quote patio11,

“The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero

He was talking about the banking system. But he was also hinting at something bigger. There is a game theory problem often referred to as the meter maid problem. What is the optimal amount of meter maids in a city, where optimal can be defined in at least a few different ways, but roughly means the cost to revenue optimal. You end up with a couple of obvious extremes, no parking enforcement means no cost, but no revenue (plus parking may end up out of control if charging for parking is more than just revenue generating). The other extreme is thay you have enough people policing parking that no one ever fail to comply, this is the highest cost, but not the highest revenue, because you don’t get revenue from ticketing. So the answer is that the optimal number lies somewhere where the number of meter maids allows some percentage of people get away with failing to comply with parking rules (whether deliberate or accidental can further complicate the problem since both will happen).

So back to your steelman. Cleaning data is most certainly a desirable thing, but it is likely not the optimal thing, especially if the cost is high. And unauditable access to systems is a very high cost. Seems to me much of this auditing could be done in a much more acciuntable way.

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spankalee 3 days ago

On top of that, there's an assumption that there's no existing cleaning effort. I'm sure there is and it's just a difficult problem. The cases left must be either in progress, hard to track down, or not actually meaningfully active.
Or, as is really common with the federal government, the agency is actually underfunded and hasn't been able to modernize because the Republicans in congress have been trying to starve the administrative capacity the classic, slow way until now.
Like with the IRS. I've made mistakes in filing, and gotten a notice from the IRS about it, but sometimes years later (!). In the meantime, if you "audited" the IRS records, you'd see that my records are out of compliance and could claim "See, there's fraud!". In reality, the IRS just has slow antiquated systems, and is barred from giving taxpayers direct access to their records. Which is by design from the rich and anti-government.

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[removed] 3 days ago

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smallmancontrov 3 days ago

Why spend money chasing people who aren't collecting checks? That sounds like waste to me.

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Terr_ 3 days ago

Also those identities can't collect checks, because if they tried it would set off alarm bells and reviews because they're over a standard "assume they're already dead" limit.
Imagine the brouhaha these same folks would be raising about "wasting your tax dollars hiring historians" if that other direction was in their self-interest.

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- jacurtis 3 days ago
  
  This is also the same argument made against IRS audits on lower tax brackets. Basically, its not generally worth audits of low income citizens. Because the manpower required to perform the audit exceeds the revenues recovered.
  Yet audits of individuals making < $25k per year is over 5.5 times higher than those in all other income brackets (1.27% vs 0.25%). So we chase down citizens when likely they probably don't even had a tax burden anyway. Maybe they misfiled some taxes and should be taxed a few hundred or even a thousand dollars more. But the manpower to chase down these little checks is a net negative on the department.
  Sure, it is possible you find fraud in some of these low income cases. Someone claims to only make $25k but really they run a cash business and make $80k. But these are likely so limited thanks to other validations the IRS has access to, that the number of cases that reveal this is extremely tiny. So back to another argument on here, there an expectations that fraud is non-zero, and we accept that because getting fraud to zero is not worth the cost.
  
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JumpCrisscross 3 days ago

> these 140/150 year old recipients

What is the evidence these exist?

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