Did missing/corrupt dates in COBOL default to 1875-05-20?

They were coded with 6 digits: 2 for month, 2 day and 2 year according to the SSA.

https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssa/yourss55.html

Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on this: the hard part in replacing/updating government system is not the coding part. The hard part is understanding the policies that have been changed and modified over the decades.

See "This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software" (Jun 2023):

> There's a lot of frustration about the government's ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges. High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there's another crucial area where the public sector often struggles, and that is software. We saw it with the infamous rollout of Obamacare. We see it in the UX of the Treasury Direct website. And we saw it in the way state unemployment insurance systems broke during the pandemic. So why is it so hard for the public sector to build and maintain software? On this episode we speak with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and former executive director of Code for America and author of the new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, as well as Dave Guarino, who recently left the Department of Labor after working on upgrading the unemployment insurance system. Both have a long history of working on public sector software systems and they explain why the problem is so tricky.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U

One large component is that a lot of business rules and policies have been encoded into the software logic, and (re-)translating that into code in a new(er) language is part of the challenge.

Related, "Why COBOL isn't the problem":

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217

Rule #1 of the new American oligarch: never admit a mistake

While this is likely true for a majority of cases. I am confident that there are both bank accounts and addresses that have remained valid since the 1940s. For example, ABA routing/account numbers on checks go back to 1910.

Presuming checks are being printed, it would not surprise me if they are being sent through the U.S. postal system. What happens to them after that, though, is anyone's guess. Banks generally stay on top of deceased customers. But even then, a bank account can be transferred to beneficiaries and retain the same account number.

i would expect that banks would flag a check being deposited in the name of a known deceased former account holder. But there have already been cases mentioned in this thread where someone can receive SSA benefits on behalf of a deceased spouse/parent. As such, it is conceivable that those checks could be deposited.

If you want to find large-scale government waste, it's going to be things like Medicare approving unnecessary treatments, or corrupt officials subtly shaping the bidding process for government contracts to make sure they're awarded to the expected cronies for the expected exorbitant costs, or subsidies that are supposed to go to the poor but are shaped in ways that really cause them to go to landlords or drug companies.

But "we streamlined the bidding process for cloud services contracts to make it feasible for smaller entities to make viable bids" is a non-headline even if it would save billions of dollars. "We're eliminating housing assistance and turning it into a refundable tax credit in the same amount for the same people" would improve government efficiency (and outcomes), but it's not viscerally satisfying and makes people feel bored or uncertain rather than happy or angry.

What sells is simple overt fraud. If you can find some 30 year old cashing their dead grandmother's social security checks, that's a headline that will get people worked up. Which means they want to go find some of that stuff to throw meat to the base, while hopefully also doing those other things that are actually more important but don't get the mob excited.

The opposition then plays politics either way. If you actually reduce Medicare spending on unnecessary treatments you're "cutting Medicare" but if you go find a few clear instances of outrageous fraud then it's "just a drop in the bucket" and you're not making any real difference.

Dead and 150? Bit harder to believe. It's an extraordinary claim, if you get my drift.

I mean, these are your own words:

> DOGE can be a misguided operation run by a grifter that misreports findings

And that's the main issue and criticism, not that everyone believes that the government is perfect

1. Misrepresenting congressionally approved expenditures he royally disapproves of as "fraud"

2. Misleading, under-researched, unsupported statistics as "waste"

The longer this goes on, the more impressed I am with our government. I had no idea it would be this hard to find anything legitimate to attack.

On top of that, Musk is so eager to announce progress that he just repeats what he is told as he knows that these are very smart programmers.

I found myself working in an heavily regulated industry recently and I can tell you if you dropped a young really smart programmer into the code base they would find a million things that are inefficient and wrong. In reality they were carefully coded that way to support some byzantine law or legacy program or one off. An experienced dev will ask "anyone know why we do X in module Y"? and he will get an answer saying "yes, its because of...". The young hotshot dev just deletes and rewrites it or yells "fraud"

So Musk is shooting himself in the foot when if he just waited and verified he could release valid and I am sure damning evidence of fraud but currently he is just "crying wolf"

IBM mainframe COBOL has two operation modes, ANSI (where day 1 is 1601-01-01) and “Lilian” (where day 1 is 1582-10-14, the day on which the Gregorian calendar was first introduced). ANSI mode complies with ANSI/ISO standards for COBOL, Lilian is an IBM-only legacy standard. So, in Lilian mode, the earliest value for YYYY is 1582. I don’t believe negative numbers are accepted.

Anyone else in the world would just stop sharing stuff publicly given this kind of public abuse. There's no requirement to do so. But Musk just shared evidence and context again, by showing the output of the equivalent of SELECT GROUP(age), COUNT(*) FROM SSNS WHERE DEAD = FALSE:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076

It shows approx 1.3 million SSNs in the 150-159 age bucket, along with many millions more that are actually over that age, and over 1000 SSNs allocated to people over 200 years old, including one that is for someone marked as 360-369 years old. There are over 20M people listed as 100+ years old. Total sum is around 395M people. Therefore there is no 1875 epoch and that claim was simply misinformation.

So here's what we know given his statements:

1. There are a lot of data entry errors in the SSN database.

2. These aren't test data, misinterpretations of an epoch, etc.

3. Such errors are extremely common and not being rectified.

4. Many SSNs aren't unique.

5. There are far more records in the database than people in America.

If we combine those statements with prior knowledge of other related topics, we can infer:

• The data quality issues are much more extensive than just age and number of records.

• Whatever processes are meant to ensure data quality don't work.

• This was not previously known to the public.

• Civil servants know all this but are often unable to do anything.

We also know that this situation is expected. It would be much more crazy if Musk announced his team couldn't find fraud in SS. Just look at the graph for payouts from the American disability benefits system - it tracks general economic performance. Other countries don't see such a thing in their payouts, where improving economic conditions magically make long term disabilities disappear, but they also tend to be more aggressive at cracking down on benefits fraud. The UK did a big purge some years ago where every single person claiming disability benefits was re-assessed.

Anytime someone comes in and does basic checks of government finance systems they always find lots of very basic stuff. At one point it was discovered, again in Britain, that a Labour council was regularly paying invoices multiple times and nobody had noticed for years. Paying money out to dead or non-existent people is a common problem in all such systems.

I guess it depends on how much prior knowledge someone has of such problems. The correct explanation isn't "nobody noticed", it's "people noticed but could not/would not do anything about it". But how much you know about these problems will depend where you get your news from. If you never read right wing sources, you aren't exposed to stories about benefits/grants fraud as places like the Guardian or CNN just don't cover it, so all this will appear fantastical and absurd. If you're used to such stories then it all seems plausible and normal.

These types of things usually have some aspects in common. One is that front line workers, when asked in a safe environment, will give enormous estimates for how much of their payout is fraudulent. The people who are in denial about it are usually the people at the top, not the bottom. They don't ask, nobody tells, they don't want to know because they'll be held accountable for it and they fundamentally, ideologically, do not care about waste or inefficiency, viewing it as preferable to even one innocent person not getting their money.

I can't find it now but Musk has alleged similar things; he got private estimates from civil servants that 50% of the payouts from their department were probably fraud of some kind (it might not have been SS, I don't remember), and that the staff in charge of blocking payments at the Treasury were told to never do so. This kind of thing is what you'd expect. Often the front line civil servants are frustrated by this situation, as it's their taxes being wasted too. It's the people at the top who cover it up.

(3) The data quality is so bad that there is no way to reliably know if a case is fraudulent or not without an investigation so expensive the ROI is negative, so everything remains unclear and unresolved forever.

That's usually how it goes with cases like these. Sometimes there are gangs who organize large scale fraud against the system and those might attract the attention of prosecutors, but people not reporting a death or double payment or similar isn't worth it. There might never be a clear answer to how the database got into this state. But the basic point stands that data quality for a critical dataset is really low in obvious ways, so what about all the non-obvious ways?

I mentioned blue zones because there are a lot of people on this thread who are really having a hard time believing there can be problems as obvious as people who have died but continue receiving payments in social security schemes. Blue zones is just an easily searchable keyword to learn more about other times when it's happened at scale, e.g.

In 2010, the Japanese government announced that 82 percent of its citizens reported to be over 100 had already died.

In 2012, Greece announced that it had discovered that 72 percent of its centenarians claiming pensions – some 9,000 people – were already dead.

Puerto Rico’s government said in 2010 that it would replace all existing birth certificates due to concerns about widespread fraud and identity theft.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/26/the-secret-of-blue-...

Obviously nobody is claiming the database reflects reality. Governments often have multiple data sources that are badly out of alignment. A census can give more accurate data, but that doesn't mean SS is synced to it. For instance, in the UK during COVID, more people came forward in some age ranges for a COVID vaccine than theoretically existed in the country at all. The UK's population data is so badly screwed up that people started using the quantity of NHS numbers issued instead to try and estimate it.

Some professional auditors on Reddit were saying how often they go into a business and find a bunch of stuff that immediately looks like fraud, then they go interview knowledgeable employees and find a ton of weird accounting edge cases which explains all the out-of-bounds stuff.

But.. it sounds much better to the population if you scream that you found $8Tn a year in fraud.

Elon knows it is BS. But that's not the point, the point is to create outrage, and legitimize it all to the MAGA crowd. It is all intentional misleading.

1. Not all arguments suffer from misinformation on both sides.

2. The political right uses misinformation as a weapon at a scale that dwarfs that of the political left. Your single example does not counter that argument.

If Musk were doing what FDR did 100 years ago -- affecting major change by working through Congress -- there would be a different response.

That commenter on DailyKos wasn't put in charge of dismantling parts of the government.

Musk Was.

You don't know what the recipient's details are, you're just saying it's a problem without knowing any of the facts around the individuals circumstances.

You're simply thinking in the most shallow way possible.

Also the social media claim was that "this is how COBOL works", not "this is how the SS system works". It does not seem that the person who made the original social media claim has any insider knowledge of the SS COBOL system.

Definitely seems like misinformation to me.

The problem is we have no solid evidence that is actually true. The claim appears to originate in an anonymous DailyKos comment which contains so many factual errors (e.g. claiming this is due to COBOL), it is unclear why any of it should be believed. For all we really know, the SSA code doesn’t treat 1875 specially at all. And even if it actually does, are these social media claims that it does based on inside knowledge of how it works, or just a lucky guess?

That’s not to say DOGE’s claims about 150 year old social security recipients are right - for all I know, they could be wrong - but, if they are wrong, it could be for some reason which is completely unrelated to “1875 as an epoch”

"The implementors* of the SS system chose 1875 as the epoch date for reasons"

So, they invented their own date system instead of just using the standard CENTURY-DATE or an ISO-8601 date from their DB. Highly doubt...

Trump fired 17 of them:

https://campaignlegal.org/update/significance-firing-inspect...

> This blatantly illegal and incredibly concerning mass firing removes the only independent offices within agencies designed to protect taxpayer money and root out corruption, fraud, waste and mismanagement.

I also posted the 2022 report the office generated elsewhere in the thread, a follow up to their 2015 report.

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.

Im genuinely curious about this, would you mind sharing references?

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.

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.

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3

[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.

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?

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.

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.

It's also worth noting that OASDI is not the same as a Civil War pension. One was set up to support men who fought in service of the Federal government, the other was set up to keep the Old Aged, Survivors, and Disabled Insured. They're legally separate programs and thus have different statutes regulating who can draw benefit from them.

The pension is claimed by the wife of the veteran , it was a practice to marry a very young girl very late in life partly because of the pension.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_wh...

The person you are referring to was eligible as a disabled child of veteran https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Triplett

There are many age curiosities out there like the fact the grandson of John Tyler the 10th president who was born in 1790 is still alive, I.e his grandfather was born 235 years ago!

they are just that curiosities, not really fraud and even when it is one, it never significant just like voter fraud never turns out to be one .

No one suggested otherwise, in fact, that's virtually verbatim what I said.

Boring Co. Crew Dragon Cybercab Cybertruck DOGE Falcon Heavy Falcon 9 FSD Grok 1,2,3 Megapack Model 3 Model X Model Y Neuralink OpenAI Optimus Powerwall Roadster 2.0 Robovan Solar Roof Starlink Starship Tesla Semi