Gertrude Weaver and her 6,500,000 "peers"
IG Audit: 6.5 Million People With Active Social Security Numbers Are 112 or Older
Excerpt:
Many people are living longer, but not to age 112 or beyond -- except in the records of the Social Security Administration. The SSA's inspector general has identified 6.5 million number-holders age 112 -- or older -- for whom no death date has been entered in the main electronic file, called Numident. The audit, dated March 4, 2015, concluded that SSA lacks the controls necessary to annote death information on the records of number-holders who exceed "maximum reasonable life expectancies." "We obtained Numident data that identified approximately 6.5 million numberholders born before June 16, 1901 who did not have a date of death on their record," the report states. Some of the numbers assigned to long-dead people were used fraudulently to open bank accounts. And thousands of those numbers apparently were used by illegal immigrants to apply for work: "During Calendar Years 2008 through 2011, SSA received 4,024 E-Verify inquiries using the SSNs of 3,873 numberholders born before June 16, 1901," the report said. "These inquiries indicate individuals' attempts to use the SSNs to apply for work." “It is incredible that the Social Security Administration in 2015 does not have the technical sophistication to ensure that people they know to be deceased are actually noted as dead,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “Tens of thousands of these numbers are currently being used to report wages to the Social Security Administration and to the IRS. People are fraudulently, but successfully, applying for jobs and benefits with these numbers. Making sure Social Security cleans up its death master file to prevent future errors and fraud is a good government reform we can all agree on,” Johnson said.Comment: Of course the problem is that there are just a handful of Americans over the age of 112. Wiki list. Also see the Social Security Actuarial Life Table. Wiki on Gertrude Weaver. Image source.
More:
ReplyDeleteAs of September 2014, the SSA was still issuing benefit payments to 266 people who were using a SSN that said they were born before June 16, 1901.
“However, in only 13 cases was it likely the beneficiary was actually age 112 or older,” the OIG said. “In the remaining 253 cases, discrepancies in SSA records indicated the beneficiary receiving payments was not born before June 16, 1901.”
In one example, a SSN that belonged to a person who was born in 1886 and died in 1965 was used to report wages of up to $17,100 a year between 2008 and 2012. The number was available because the SSA never recorded a date of death.