And that means what?
Data values are nothing without the exact context in which they were created and the exact context in which they are used. That's like level 1 data analysis.
Publishing such data without context is deceitful.
Data values are nothing without the exact context in which they were created and the exact context in which they are used. That's like level 1 data analysis.
Publishing such data without context is deceitful.
I don't know why some people are finding it so hard to accept that there is likely to be fraud in this system. Look into the determined origins of the so called blue zones to see that every country has problems with this, albeit some more than others. It's the government giving out free money, so naturally it attracts very sophisticated fraud schemes and civil servants are rarely motivated to track it down and investigate properly.
1) Take the numbers at face value. In that case, you are predicting millions of accusations of fraud and an enormous number of prosecutions in the next year or two.
2) the situation is somehow more complicated, and most of those millions of records with 140+ ages do not represent fraudulent activity.
P.S. Mentioning the blue zones is incredibly silly. Those regions have modest numbers of individuals being reported in the 100-120 age range, which probably are fraudulent. None of those areas have millions being reported to be 140+. For instance, Sardinia had 13 reported centenarians per 100,000 population, which would be equivalent to ~39,000 centenarians in the US. So it's orders of magnitude less than this database shows.
(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.
It would still be incredibly dishonest for Musk to say based on these numbers that this is the largest fraud in history.
> 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.
Those numbers are three to four orders of magitude smaller than the ones we're discussing. Even factoring in the US being 30 times larger than Greece, we would have less than half a million pensioners if the proportion is similar.
The fact is, Elon found a number and waved it around like a red flag. And both of us are smart enough[0] to know that it doesn't mean what he says it means. But for some reason, you're insisting on defending the original deceptive tweets.
[0] I mean that genuinely! I've read your posts on garbage collection. And in this discussion I take it you're recognizing that those millions of records are likely overwhelming not fraudulent.
There's slippage of claims here, maybe. It's clearly not the case that every record with wrong data is fraudulent, and I don't think Musk believes or said that (though maybe he did, the dude tweets all the time). We certainly agree that it isn't the case.
The claims being made as I understand it are that the US SSDB has a lot of obviously wrong data in it, that bad age data is frequently a sign of fraud as proven by the audits of other countries, the age data is genuinely bad and not a result of misunderstandings, and therefore that Musk is likely correct when he argues there is a lot of fraud in the system.
What does "a lot" mean? It's vague but clearly not 100%. At the same time, if the numbers do transfer then less than half a million people fraudulently claiming pensions is quite a lot! And that would be just one source of fraud, one of the easiest to detect without effort. There will be plenty of people under the age of 100 who have died and weren't registered either, or people who never existed and so on. So whether we're talking millions, or a million, or even with a very restricted criteria less than half a million. In ordinary English, it's a lot.
Direct quote from Musk:
"Yes, there are FAR more 'eligible' social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA.
This might be the biggest fraud in history."[0]
The worst part is that there’s already a public report about these social security numbers. And it genuinely makes the SSA look bad, but it also makes clear that very few of these accounts ever received payments, and of those that did, they were generally cut off around a decade ago.[1] Does Musk know about the report? Does he care?
If someone wanted to come in and clean house and say "you have to do better" I can imagine there's a case to be made there. That's not what's happening, though.
Whichever it is I would be very careful before making any grand public statements about it. And as far as fraud goes this doesn't sound anywhere near sophisticated.
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.
"His team and some higher-ups at Treasury guesstimated that at least half of a very high risk category of payments, making up roughly 1.3% of total entitlement spending, are obvious fraud"
> One is that front line workers, when asked in a safe environment, will give enormous estimates for how much of their payout is fraudulent.
I would love to see a real source for this and what kind of information they were using to make those estimates.
> 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.
This is a wildly uncharitable interpretation. A more reasonable one, and one that you will see echoed throughout research on this topic, is that enforcement itself needs to go through a cost-benefit analysis. We can always invest more to catch more fraud, but at what point are we spending more money than we are recovering, and what was the human cost of delays or erroneous denials for eligible individuals. The alternative is itself a wasteful mindset that cares more about punishing evildoers than it does about stretching tax dollars or providing for those less fortunate as the law demands.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/elon-musk-alleges-50b-f...
Yes, I've encountered a person recently on this forum who had taken the position that even a single case of fraud is unacceptable; it's better to waste an infinite amount of money to catch all fraud, than to have a program at all if the alternative is to tolerate any level of fraud. I tried to engage them on the futility of this but they insisted it was a matter of morality to stamp out said fraud, because not doing so encouraged it.
And if they had I would expect more detailed 'proof' than the single simplest SQL query one could think of.
Or actually I wouldn't expect any public statements at all. Scoring quick political points is nowhere near worth endangering the legal cases. Which could not be anywhere close to even identifying the alleged fraudsters in such a short amount of time.
You seem quite happy to find reasons for something you expected to be true. Like I was happy to know he made a silly mistake with epochs.
Excited by this I quickly tried and unfortunately succeeded to falsify that information. Could you do me a favour and try the same with your read of events?
> "This retard thinks the government uses SQL"
URL provided because if the country can be saved your first reaction should still be "No way that actually happened!", but it did:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961
Tweet submitted for HN discussion here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078219
I was arguing it should be yours as well.
And you seem to want to go off-topic, again, but what idiot would believe the U.S. government doesn't use SQL? The U.S. government is the direct cause of the creation of SQL.
I just thought that when debating whether the information provided by Musk was a simple SQL statement, and the general weight to put on it, the fact that he recently confidently stated that the government don't use SQL was a relevant bit of info to use when we weigh up alternative hypotheses.
Why on earth would you believe a serial liar?
I still stand by the other things I said though.
What we're discussing here is a bunch of tweets, not a legal case put before a judge. Musk is often throwing around the word fraud to mean something like "we were told the money would be spent on wells in Africa but it's actually being given to newspapers" and similar things which probably wouldn't be considered fraud in a courtroom, but people know what he means.
I'm happy to double check specific claims, but I'm not sure what you're uncertain about. You're arguing that if you discover fraud you have to continuing giving the fraudsters money until the guy finally shows up in court? Or is found guilty? I don't quite know how or why I'd double check that because that's not how the law works and it would be silly if it did.
(Feb 2025) Bereaved families asked to return pension overpayments
Over the past five years, the DWP mistakenly paid more than £500m in state pensions and pension credits to the deceased, recovering about half from bereaved relatives.
They can't prosecute this because it's not fraud if someone just gives you money and then later realizes it was a mistake. So they must resort to asking the families if they'd kindly return the money.
You say the age field isn't the only thing being used to determine payouts - obviously that's true, there is also the is_dead field. These systems are about giving you money after a certain age until you die. If those fields are inaccurate then the money paid out will also be inaccurate.
It's unfortunate you got so personal at the end there. There's no conspiracy being theorized anywhere here. Just a lack of care when it comes to other people's money.
This is the important missing context. Musk can and does claim a lot. He rarely, if ever, provides any evidence or context. And none of his or his team's actions can be verified or monitored.
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.
Isn't that entirely expected? Someone coming to the US on a work visa gets assigned an SSN, works for some time and then leaves.
Two things to consider here: the first is that we don’t know if those records are actually tied to checks being sent, and we don’t know whether they’re linked to people who are still living (older men marrying younger women wasn’t uncommon). Anyone who’s worked on systems like this knows that you often have to review the entire record and the code which uses it because over the decades coders overloaded other fields on a fixed-size record.
The other thing to keep in mind is that most federal agencies have been underfunded for decades and government systems have to be more careful about false positives than false negatives. If they flag someone’s record as fraudulent and stop sending checks, that might mean some 90 year old gets evicted or can’t get the medical care they need, which is both inhumane and also a big political risk if their representatives or the media pick up the story. If you don’t have the staff to dig into data correction, it’s much safer to continue sending a small amount of money than to cut them off when you don’t have a confirmation of death.
Quoting the generally critical IG report:
> Approximately 18.4 million (98 percent) numberholders are not currently receiving SSA payments and have not had earnings reported to SSA in the past 50 years (see Table 2).
> The fact that these individuals were age 100 or older, had no earnings in the past 50 years, and received no SSA payments indicates they are deceased.
The IG report you link is very useful! It confirms a lot of what Musk has posted about the age buckets in the database, proving there was never any misunderstanding of the schema or epochs.
It does also say that many of the numbers without accurate death data aren't being used to pay out, which is why the SSA doesn't bother fixing them (which leads to the question of what did cause the payouts to stop?). So, the bad age/death data doesn't automatically imply pensions fraud.
Nonetheless the OIG is in Musk's corner here (as of July 2023). The reason is that even if SSA isn't paying out their death data is used by the rest of the US government to stop fraudulent payouts for benefits programmes after death, and so the SSA not bothering to ensure data quality opens up the rest of the government to fraud even if we accept their claim that it's not causing them problems directly. The OIG writes, "SSA has not established controls to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies ... Death information missing from the Numident and the [death master file] hampers both SSA and Government-wide efforts to prevent and detect fraud and misuse".
Mostly, they never started. Likely because the person died a long time ago, in many cases before the Death Master File existed and before claiming benefits, which is why as the OIG report notes, the vast majority of the numebrs in question have no records at all on the MBR, which contains everyone who has claimed beneffits administered by SSA since the 1970s.
In other cases, they started when the person was alive and eligible, and ended when social security got death information, which was recorded in the Master Beneficiary Record--where it needs to be to stop payment--but not in Numident. (All this is in the OIG report.)
> The reason is that even if SSA isn't paying out their death data is used by the rest of the US government to stop fraudulent payouts for benefits programmes after death
Like Social Security, other federal benefits programs do a lot more to verify that the person claiming information is eligible to receive benefits they are claiming then checking whether or not they are listed as dead in Social Security records, both initially and periodically. Social Security numident death information is a secondary check, not a single-source of truth. You want it right or both its primary and secondary uses, but its not the primary way that beneficiaries are validated as being both alive and who they claim to be.
So, it was just data without context. And the important context is:
- the issues with this data isn't unknown
- this data has already been investigated
- Musk's claims can be charitably called exaggerations. Quote from the report that you say "is in Musk's court": "We acknowledge that almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments"
Pretty obviously the most common reason would be that the payments never started in the first place.
US social security payments don't start automatically on reaching an age, but you need to apply for them, right? Processing the application would be the ideal time to do all kinds of validity checks.
I've got popcorn ready for when President Musk's incelbro's use database queries to delete 20 million fraudulent Social Security accounts.
https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
>Other countries don't see such a thing in their payouts, where improving economic conditions magically make long term disabilities disappear
I don't know much about this but this could easily be explained by policy differences. The US has extremely strict income limits around disability:
> If you continue to work, your condition must also limit you from earning income above an amount we call “substantial gainful activity” (SGA). In 2024, SGA is $1,550 per month
We literally quantify disability by economic output, it would be insane not to expect disabilities to "disappear" when the economy improves and pay rises. Does that mean there is little to no fraud? Of course not, I know that I don't know enough to claim that.
Both of these are great examples of the limits of this "first principles" approach to complex legal and social systems, and everyone should be extremely skeptical of someone like Elon who is seemingly incapable of the self-reflection necessary to realize he might not have the whole picture.
He doesn't. All he has shown is a list and claimed what he claimed. Based on that alone you're ready to expound a full theory spanning several pages of text.
And most of that text is trying to guess and to fill in the context. None of your guesses are correct until shown otherwise, and he hasn't shown anything except this list.
And yet we already know from his team's actions how reckless they are and how far from the truth are the many claims they make.
https://xcancel.com/ThatsMauvelous/status/189135619250239902...
The only exception I'd see is if there are people who have somehow gamed the system to collect multiple payments at once.