The Social Security Administration asked its inspector general to investigate how a $32.3 billion mistake skewed its statistics on 2009 wages in the U.S.Two people were found to have filed multiple W-2 forms that made them into multibillionaires, an agency official said yesterday. Those reports threw statistical wage tables out of whack and, in figures released Oct. 15, made it appear that top U.S. earners had seen their pay quintuple in 2009 to an average of $519 million.
The agency yesterday released corrected tables that showed the average incomes of the top earners, in fact, declined 7.7 percent to $84 million each.
Social Security spokesman Mark Lassiter provided few details about the W-2 forms and declined to answer questions about how they were filed, how many were filed by the same two people, or if a hoax was suspected. “We call it erroneous, you call it fictitious. It’s the same thing,” Lassiter said. “There were some invalid, I guess is the best way to put it, W- 2s.”
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Nov 2, 2010
That's A Big Mistake
From Bloomberg Businessweek:
To make it clear, this was a mistake in a statistical table. This would have had no effect upon anyone's Social Security benefits. I cannot guess why anyone would do this intentionally.
Before people start commenting on how a 32 billion W-2 should be identified as obviously phoney, I have no idea if Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Slim Whitman gets a W-2 or how his wealth is reported to the government and so the idea of one being that large does not sound wrong to me. I get one, it makes sense they would too. (MIght not be what really happens, but how would most people know?)
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