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Comment by tiernano | Hacker News Reader

Wait. If the issue is that birth year is missing, how is that possible?? I mean, its social security! Isn't one of the key ideas of that based on age? If its like the Irish system, a card is sent on your 18th birthday (iirc… its been a while since i got mine!) with full details. How would they know what age you are for different entitlements? Retirement? Etc? That's seems very odd…

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There are other ways to prove eligibility. For instance if you've been working for 50 or more years then you're likely to be eligible. Or you might have school or other records that give you an approximate age. Or your children may have birth certificates that give you a minimum age.

The real world is full of anomalies and missing data, the system deals with it according to the law and administrative precedent.

Edit: here you go: https://www.ssa.gov/help/iClaim_poa.html

Also: https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0200302000!opendo...

When dealing with a population the size of the USA, and edge case you can imagine will be hit. Dealing with uncertainty is a must.

It's not uncommon for people born in countries with dysfunctional governments to have an unknown date of birth, or at least no official record of it.

They would still get a proforma birth date.

Maybe in the US, I don't actually know. What date do they use then?

In my country such cases get an unknown date of birth. Having just a year of birth is also possible.

A lot of Native Americans used Jan 1 for their birth date when signing up for WW2 service.

Many service members during the drafts would add or subtract a few years with the help of local authorities.

My grandfather didn't know his birth year and lied to make himself seem younger when it suited him.

I have great-grandparents without any documentation that we suspect were fleeing wars or had been shanghaied

I have at least one 3x great-grandparent with only a first name before her marriage. We know nothing else about her.

There have been a lot of threads of 'Things Programmers Believe About Time' that are worth looking into. The exceptions to 'computer time' and reality are fun and tough to deal with. Same things apply to names. Suffice to say, Elon's crack team hasn't really thought of the reality of life and the messiness of it.

But that's not the point and we all know it.

My father used to work with someone who was originally from some Pacific Island country (forget which, might have been Fiji). And the story was, in that country, at least back then, you didn't get a birth certificate at birth; to register your children with the government, you had travel to a government office that was like a day's walk away (most people didn't have cars). And so a lot of parents didn't bother doing it with their eldest child, they'd wait until they'd had a few, and then go register them in a batch. And the government officials had no proof of when the child was actually born, so they just put down the date you registered them as the date of birth. Which meant this guy had the same date of birth as all his younger siblings, despite being several years older than them. And then he used that to get a passport, and then a visa to immigrate to Australia, and then after a few years Australian citizenship... and now all his legal documents say he's a few years younger than he actually is. And he decided he wasn't even going to try to fix it, the morass of bureaucracy involved wasn't worth it.

> It's not uncommon for people born in countries with dysfunctional governments

Think of the United States during the Great Depression, for instance. Today’s 80 to 100 year olds were born in that era.

> I mean, its social security! Isn't one of the key ideas of that based on age?

Do we know those people are actually receiving support? Could be a hack of the system to take people out of welfare, without removing their whole entry. Maybe those are (again) double-entries with a different purpose, or dead people, or future receivers, or old entries, or just poor data. Just looking at a database, without looking at the business-logic, is usually not a good argument. Heck, It would be actually funny if the DOB of those entries is just saved in a different table or field, and they just did not understand what they are looking at.

It could be a ETL error during ingestion into a reporting system, casting errors, all sorts of things, the speculation is endless.

If you think about it, Social Security really doesn't really need to care that much what your birthday was when you are working and paying taxes into the system. When you retire and want to collect benefits is when things would change. If you don't have proof of age at that point you may need to go through some hoops to prove your age & eligibility. So it makes sense there could be millions of people in there with a day 0 since the epoch age. Also, don't forget millions of undocumented workers have a SS# and won't be collecting any benefits later.

What makes you think people with no known age are receiving benefits?

This entire tangent is based off Elon Musk not understanding COBOL or the thing he's looking at before he started ranting on X.

There's literally not enough information about anything, it's just anything which can be spun to fit the narrative he's already determined.

What precisely is your point? There are various benefits not contingent on age, so while it is concerning, it by no means would by itself invalidate someone's entitlement in receiving the checks. There is probably some interface or was, for a period, a bug that meant nulls were entering the db, or something of that nature. This needs to be fixed if it still exists, and the data needs to be made true.

So how do they know the age of someone who has incomplete records like that? Take their word for it? That sounds like trouble.

What would invalidate the benefits is death. This 150 year old business is a corner case obviously, so finding those dead people is not so easy. I'd assume there are more checks issued to dead people who were never reported than dead people who were properly recorded as dead. I don't know the frequency of fraud in either case but one is easier to get away with than the other.

Sounds like big, socialist, communist government to force citizens to register their birthday with the state.

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