Comment by smallmancontrov
2 days ago
Elon has been operating in bad faith since the Twitter Files (so, the very start). Announce X, publish receipts that show ~X, but nobody reads receipts so checkmate.
The "140 year old people in social security DB" post is just the latest example of bad-faith. Either there is actually >>$100B of social security fraud and that's the story or he wants to pretend like that's the case when he knows full well that presence in the DB does not indicate eligibility or payouts.
Agreed. Show the check numbers, mailing dates, bank transfers, etc. If there's actually really tens of billions flowing out to dead people monthly... demonstrate that. Should NOT be hard at all.
Should not be hard... if it exists. Which is why I'm 99% sure it doesn't. But the lie will go twice around the world before the truth gets its pants on, as always.
For sake of testing your position, let's assume the fraud is true and he does what you want and publishes the details like that.
What about the corner-case person who actually is legitimate and now has incredibly private information out there to make stealing their identity trivial? As a statistical anomaly who is often that corner case, I'm glad you're not the one making the policy. I wish Elon wasn't as well, and I'm sure there's going to be a giant mess at the end, but using government power (which Elon has, whether rightly or wrongly) to publish personal information about people (which they get by force giving their monopoly on government power) especially without trial or due diligence is very wrong IMHO.
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> What about the corner-case person who actually is legitimate and now has incredibly private information out there to make stealing their identity trivial?
Elon usually has doesn't have any compunction about throwing innocent people under the bus if he thinks he gains something even if indirectly.
But that aside, you can show evidence of massive fraud, without revealing private information to general public. Can certainly reveal it to relevant authorities.
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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.
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
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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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...
OIG Response:
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.
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.
Why spend money chasing people who aren't collecting checks? That sounds like waste to me.
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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> these 140/150 year old recipients
What is the evidence these exist?
Show us the (public) Court Filings. The formal start of education to evaluate if there is truth, if there is a guilty party, and to legally render a verdict. The check numbers and other PII can be evaluated by the courts. We the People can know the numbers; the scale per case and in sum, of the 'fraud' identified.
Presence in the DB allows for downstream fraud, even by accident. If that DB is the source of truth for SS payouts elsewhere, clean up the data. There's no reason for it to be there.
Social Security receives payments as well as makes them. SSNs are keys for both.
The “super old person” SSN numbers are in the DB mostly because non-citizens are using them to pay into the system. If you delete those numbers, the next payroll run will inject them right back in.
And you would remove important accounting metadata for each payment. Metadata that is consumed by the systems that prevent fraudulent payments from going out.
The only way to stop the fake/bad SSNs is to go into the field and address each instance with employers. This is time-consuming and expensive, which is why no one has done it much.
The reason given that the SSA does not clean up the data is it would cost too much for little to no administrative benefit. They also don't want to add new inaccurate data to the system.
The no administrative benefit bit checks out with napkin math. Of the 18.9 million entries for people age 100 or older they are paying out benefits to 44,000. The total number of people in the US age 100 or older is around 90k to 100k, depending on time period for comparison.
There's an Inspector General audit report in a nearby comment for source.
> Presence in the DB allows for downstream fraud, even by accident.
That's like saying null columns in a particular database table must be filled in (or have the row entirely erased) because someone, somewhere, somehow, might infer the wrong thing about them, if they completely ignore all the other tables and business rules.
___
"Hello, I am Oldy McOldperson. Give me money."
"...Sorry sir, but that person would be almost 150 years old now, and that's well past our Impossibly Old threshold of 115 years. Furthermore, one our other databases says that person was reported as missing 90 years ago."
"But Oldy's--I mean, my precise confirmed date of death is still blank, therefore I'm alive, so give me money!"
"Sir, only a complete moron would believe that's how it works."
Elon has been operating in bad faith since he called that hero diver a pedo
Elon has been operating in bad faith since he came to the US on a student visa and then illegally worked for a startup.
And then faked his degrees