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.
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.
I still stand by the other things I said though.
Why on earth would you believe a serial liar?
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.
"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.