Un-aliving the Un-dead in Social Security

Before this important work started, there were 3,467,066 SSNs for people between the ages of 120-129 who weren’t “marked as deceased” (presumably this means “whose record had no date of death” rather than an actual Boolean column for DECEASED). Now there are only 2,649,588 such SSNs. So 817,478 have been corrected! Wait what? Why only 23% of them? Why not all of them? My guess would be that what actually happened here is an update of data in the NUMIDENT database (which as we’ve discussed before, is not used for managing payments) using existing date-of-death info in the MBR database (which is used for managing payments). That’s why it’s only 23%, the other 77% may be missing date-of-death info in MBR [Master Beneficiary Record] as well. There are of course other possibilities, like there may be a record of a survivor’s benefit paid for someone with no date of death – but in that case how would you know what date of death to put in? You could just make one up (given what we know of the DOGE team, it’d probably be “4/20/69” [see here —LS]), but that may have unintended side effects on reporting, etc. Unfortunately, DOGE (which is the most transparent organization in history², according to the man in charge of it who’s actually not in charge of it when it comes time to submit sworn declarations under penalty of perjury³) hasn’t provided any information about what specifically was done here.

DOGE also has not provided any specific information to indicate that any of this matters at all….

So the really important piece of information we need here is: How many of these dead-but-alive SSNs were receiving payments? I don’t know and neither do you, because to date no one has been able to provide an answer to that extremely basic question other than “some” (Musk) or “many” (Trump) and it isn’t clear if either of those answers applies to people over 120 (clearly fraud) or just people over 100 (those payments could well be legitimate). The most likely answer for the 120+ set is “none,” because Social Security (SS) already automatically prevents payments to anyone over the age of 115⁵.