Hacker News Reader

Comment by samus | Hacker News Reader

What about a public registry of deaths that can notify parties with justified interest (pension providers, maybe insurances and banks) about such events? That should work for domestic cases at least. Tracking deaths for people living abroad in their retirement is more tricky I admit.

Maybe such a registry doesn't exist in the UK to begin with? Since it also doesn't have a residence registry.

Edit: my bad, it actually works too well and then they do a bad job at matching records. I should have read TFA first...

View on HN

That assumes all deaths are logged. There are strong financial incentives for relatives to hide a death from the government if it means getting a check every month

It's quite hard to hide a death in the UK. In hospital all deaths are certified, outside of hospital you have the interesting problem of how to deal with the corpse. And in addition to the death register there are also tax filings (including Council Tax, which is a hefty sum and paid monthly), utilities, and other services that require ID.

The media do print occasional Capitalist Gothic stories of people who kept a corpse in their house. But that's incredibly rare and - for obvious reasons - a high price to pay for a monthly cheque.

Governments hate spending money on people.

The government loves spending money on themselves.

So the government thinks it's perfectly reasonable to have 50 FTE spend 5 years on preventing a single false claim. Ideally through the commisioner's brother's company, not directly. This is a necessity!

What are the obvious reasons? it's not like you have to actually keep the body in your apartment.

The usefulness of a death register depends on how well people are identified.

In the US, the pervasiveness of social security numbers as id makes the social security death register very useful. Sure, there may be some deaths unreported, and some reported under the wrong SSN for various reasons, but most of the time it works.

I don't think the UK has a similar enumeration of people, and then you've got data problems. Names drift over time. Name and birthdate aren't unique. People may forget their birthdate non-fradulently and use another one; people reporting the death may not have the right birthdate and guess, etc.

And "most of the time" is not a problem?

Is it? And even if it was, is it worth the expense to track them and annoy the "false positives"?

What? The parent seems to argue that it's good enough that "most of the time" it's the correct SSN that's declared dead. No big deal that occasionally the wrong SSN is blamed. How can that be good enough? The point of all these systems is that they can go wrong. And since we are dealing with people who, you know, have other things to do than fixing other people's mistakes, then these systems must make it easy to correct the problems. And should minimize the consequences. And probably compensate for them.

What does that even mean "annoy the "false positives"" in this case? You mean just leave them dead?

With "false positives" I mean people mistakenly identified as deceased. Anyways, since there is an SSN, such problems happen less often to begin with. And once it is resolved, then it should stay resolved as the record is associated with the SSN.

Even in the present UK case, the actual problem was the incompetent way how the "false positive" was resolved, not the fact that it occurred in the first place

The death itself may be hidden for a long time.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/world-oldest...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com