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Comment by NoPicklez | Hacker News Reader

It is, I assume this post has been made because Elon recently said when he addressed the media next to Trump that they supposedly found people who were 150 years old collecting social security payments.

What has followed is people coming out of the woodwork to explain how this may have been reflected in the system since the system was written in COBOL and the reasons why those people were reflected that way the system, that they likely weren't actually having those payments made and it there wasn't the wastage of tax payers money as Elon claims.

Whereby citizens that don't have a recorded age are represented with an age of 0 and COBOL backdates their age from 1875.

It seems to be Elon's DOGE team having access to data that they have little experience in reviewing and understanding and are spreading claims that are false.

Google it.

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> What has followed is people coming out of the woodwork to explain how this may have been reflected in the system since the system was written in COBOL

There’s zero evidence these “people coming out of the woodwork” have any idea what they are actually talking about. No evidence they have ever worked for SSA or have any insider info on how its systems work. It appears these “people coming out of the woodwork” are just random nobodies speculating in public (likely incorrectly), and people are repeating their speculation because they like how it sounds and they don’t know enough about the topic to realise that it probably isn’t true

You literally have that backwards. The misinfo is that COBOL would be back-dating to 1875, as is made clear by the linked StackExchange thread and anyone else that has actually used COBOL. Regardless, people without an accurate age in the Social Security database should not be getting payments either, even if they are not actually 150.

Okay regardless of whether I had it backwards the intent of my post was still correct. That there may have been people in the system that were 150 years old, due to the COBOL language.

And who says they actually were being paid, was that just assumed or did they find that people were inappropriately being paid? It is been circulated that there is an automated component that prevents that from happening if people are aged past 115 years old

https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0202602578

It is irresponsible to stand up in front of the Whitehouse and spew that there are people receiving social security payments that are 150 years old, without performing a formal inquiry into the matter or communicating the detail appropriately.

> That there may have been people in the system that were 150 years old, due to the COBOL language.

Yes, but this is the whole aspect that is misinformation: there is no evidence that (alleged) “150 year old social security recipients” has anything to do with COBOL. That appears to be simply some speculative and likely incorrect theory that some random cooked up, and people that don’t know any better are repeating as fact

It is entirely possible that Musk/DOGE’s claims about this topic will turn out to be incorrect - but if they do, then I very much doubt that the actual reason, whatever it may turn out to be, will be due to any feature of the COBOL language (or the implementation of it SSA is using)

The entire issue I have is that there was no substantiated evidence from Elon either, the public is left to speculate as to why.

But Elon made a great headline for himself without any nuanced or substantiated view.

The solution to Musk’s misinformation isn’t anti-Musk misinformation

Furthermore, while I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk’s claims turn out to be a exaggeration or distortion, they are an exaggeration or distortion of genuine internal government info - being weighed against uninformed speculation by Internet randoms

Personally I'd be more worried by uninformed speculation by the unqualified internet randoms currently reallocating the government budget than uniformed speculation of internet randoms pointing out that given their representation of "genuine internal government info" makes no sense there might be multiple more logical explanations. I don't think the barriers to comment on internet forums should be higher than the barriers to running the country, but YMMV

this is why the social media powered bullshit machine is so effective.

Scenario: Chief executive president says that children are raped by unicorns. People react by saying, there is no way, unicorns don't exist. How do you know they don't exist? There are no animals with a unicorn-looking long twisted horn on their foreheads, some people respond. Somebody else points out that Narwhals exist and somehow we've reached the conclusion that people astonished with the president in chief are somehow just people with musk derangement syndrome and talking from their asses.

In the meantime the extraordinary claim that started all this goes unaddressed and we're ready to repeat the cycle with the next inflammatory bait that takes no time to produce and drains all the energy of all those who want to make sense of it.

They specifically said these people are getting payments. That means whether the cause is accurate representation in the database, or inaccurate representation in the database, this linchpin data should invalidate any payments.

Do they know that or do they think or assume that?

There is supposedly an automated process to remove social security payments from people over the age of 115, unless there is an exception.

https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0202602578

Entirely possible that part of the system fails on whatever is causing there to be 150 year olds.

There are a multitude of possibilities, of which none of them were addressed by Musk with no nuance at all.

I don't think it is useful to do that in a press conference.

Neither is it useful to make such claims as he did so blatantly

Well, it is useful for him, as (if it turns out to be mostly true) then it highlights how poorly operations in our government are.

The only reason you have to believe that Musk's statements are not correct is the aforementioned inaccurate assertion about COBOL.

> The only reason you have to believe that Musk's statements are not correct is [...]

And his well documented history of spouting bullshit and flim-flam.

That's ingenuoua. He posted the ssa's process for culling 115 year olds above. Also, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Presently, there is no evidence.

This is precisely why business and government are different entities. Business is a wealth-creating opportunity with less responsibility. Government may not be low-latency, but its aim is to be responsible and correct. Confusing the two is a major problem.

What is ingenuoua?

What was the claim? That there are millions of people above 120 years old in the SS database that aren't marked dead? That doesn't sound extraordinary, or a claim that's hard to challenge by even past employees that had access to the data. but all we got is propaganda and FUD.

Right, so it's useful to just just say things without evidence, because they "might turn out to be true" in the future.

Something being useful to Musk and his goons doesn't make it "useful" without such qualifiers.

> The only reason you have to believe that Musk's statements are not correct is the aforementioned inaccurate assertion about COBOL.

Hardly. That's just saying how little attention you paid to the man.

Not giving out evidence in a press conference (how does he even do that?) does not mean that his assertions were made without evidence.

So where's the evidence?

Presumably in the SS database. Is your idea that he should give everyone on the internet access to this database? Because other than seeing it for yourself, I'm not sure what evidence he can provide that you will believe.

More than zero would be a start. You said it's not viable to give evidence of claims during a press conference, okay, but it's been a while since then.

His team ran a query and shared the results. How is that zero? What do you expect him to provide? Litterally NOBODY is arguing that the results aren't accurate based on data other than an, easily verifiable, erroneous claim about the COBOL platform or "mUsK SAiD iT"

No analyst or technical insiders have come out to dispute it, can't be that wrong.

>so it's useful to just just say things without evidence, because they "might turn out to be true" in the future.

The evidence is a query run on the data. No insiders have disputed the results.

>Hardly. That's just saying how little attention you paid to the man.

Convincing evidence filled rebuttal from an internet rando. What @fastball said is based on readily available fact.

In fact, if you read that document, it mentions there are exceptions in which the automated process doesn't terminate someone for being >115, and the termination has to be done manually for:

> Beneficiaries with other claimants active on the record;

> Dually or technically entitled beneficiaries with a discrepancy among records (information pertaining to date of birth (DOB), suspension, and termination; or

> Beneficiaries in an active pay status on a dually entitled record.

What we don't know, is how many >115 records get pushed to manual processing, and how efficient that processing is. Is there a backlog? How big is it?

It mentions that one thing that can prevent the automated process, is when they have multiple records for a person, and they have conflicting dates of birth – and then they have to follow some process to resolve the discrepancy. What happens if they get stuck and can't work out which date of birth is the right one?

It also mentions how in some cases they need proof of death to carry out the manual termination. What if their attempts to procure such proof are unsuccessful?

Speculation: maybe there are a cohort of individuals who are long deceased, but they fall into one of the exceptions to the automated termination at 115 process, SSA is missing proof of death, and if nobody is actually "cashing the checks", it might be administratively easier to just keep on "paying" them by printing the checks and then burying them at the back of a filing cabinet than to cancel their social security. Maybe that's who these "150 year old social security recipients" are. So nobody would actually be committing fraud, and the government isn't really losing any money (since the checks are never cashed). Not exactly good, but maybe not quite as bad as Musk et al make it sound either. And quite likely it is just a small handful of people who are a rounding error in the federal budget.

>...exceptions in which the automated process doesn't terminate someone for being >115

You gave a several good explanations about why the current automated processes don't mark the records as deceased. But those are excuses. Just because the design of the system is flawed, that doesn't mean the system isn't in error because the code implements the design.

All those sound like it needs to be fixed to me. As somebody that deals with data for large enterprises that are nowhere near, obviously, as the government, but definitely companies with 100k employees and several in the Fortune 20. It's rudimentary to: - have a data staging area before data gets into any financial system intended for payment transactions. Those staging systems can be used for analytical, reporting, and especially data cleaning. - No use one record to represent the obligations to a completely different records of the same type. i.e. overloaded corrupt master data.

Uncurated data systems should be treated completely differently than systems that actually impacts financial transactions. Just because it's taxpayer money, they shouldn't be able to avoid criticism because they're wasting the money. If anything they should be more accountable.

There has been an ongoing dispute between the SSA and its OIG about what to do about millions of dormant accounts for which SSA lacks a date of death. [0] SSA OIG views these accounts as a risk and wants them marked as presumed dead. SSA argues that it is unnecessary, that it would cost millions in administrative and IT costs for little real benefit, that there is a risk of accidentally marking living people as dead, and disagrees that it is a fraud risk since no benefits have been paid to these dormant accounts for many decades, and any attempt to “reactivate” one of them would be flagged as an anomaly and investigated as potential fraud. It would not surprise me if Musk’s claims of “150 year old social security recipients” turn out to be a distortion of this pre-existing debate. The distortion is in presenting these accounts as active cases of fraud, since the vast majority of them haven’t received benefits in decades, or never claimed them to begin with - they are mostly long-dead people who were registered with the SSA in the first few decades of its existence, but for whatever reason their death was never reported to the SSA (the processes for doing so were less effective decades ago and so the further back you go, the more deaths were “missed”)

[0] see e.g. https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

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