They also found that there’s people over 200, so that default date thing doesn’t really explain it all.
It’s because that explanation isn’t correct. The real deal is you just have entries without a death date, so if you ran a query this get super old ages as a result.
Note that isn’t a database of payments or even people eligible for them, just a listing of ‘everyone’ with a SSN. There is a separate master death index. In the old days, wild west kind of stuff people would disappear so the death date would never get entered. Modern days every morgue and funeral home has to legally notify SS when someone dies, there is a specific form and major hell to pay if you don’t do it.
Social Security numbers were first issued in 1937. You would have need someone to be over 110 in 1937 to have an age over 200. I think that it’s a combination of birthdays entered wrong plus no official death date.
I think those are related to survivor benefits. Like an old man marrying a young woman in the 40’s. Like the civil war vets marrying woman in the 20th century. The last civil war widow was getting benefits until she died in 2020. But still the same basic issue.
But in that case the old man isn’t getting benefits but just is needed as a reference for the person actually getting them.
Also a lot of people between 110 and 150, so I’m sure there is a larger answer.
However, Social Security cuts off at 115, and they supposedly found like 10 million people older than that. Considering there are only ~50m people on Social Security, and the database they were searching wasn’t even about current recipients, most people would conclude that there is likely an error in data, rather than immediately jump to fraud. Of course, ketamine is a hell of a drug and Elon is not most people.
It’s definitely still concerning if the database has a large number of errors. But systematic fraud would be much worse ofc.
the database doesn’t have to necessarily be accurate if there’s other checks - a flag for test data, a system that checks the person is real against another database before dispersing funds etc
