From the Daily Beast:
What might be called Day of the Dead Living is being continually played out at a Social Security Administration (SSA) office in upstate New York, and likely across the country.
“We have people who did not receive benefits come in every day with their ID and say, ‘I’m not dead, I’m alive!” says Rennie Glasgow, a claims technical analyst with 15 years of experience at the agency who handles the most challenging cases at the Schenectady office.
These supposed dead are not to be confused with more than 6,000 living immigrants the Trump administration moved to the SSA Death Master File (DMF) in an attempt to force them to self-deport by depriving them of the ability to work legally.
Many more American citizens were wrongly consigned to the DMF after Elon Musk’s DOGE goons bullied their way onto the SSA’s databases and mistakenly decided that “countless” people listed as 120 years old and older were receiving benefits.
“[DOGE staffers] went into the system and they killed off people,” Glasgow told the Daily Beast. “About 4 million people, they marked them as dead. But they’re not sure if those people were supposed to be marked as dead, so they’re sending us an email saying, ‘If these people come into the office with their identification, you can reinstate them.’” …
11 comments:
Ask to be brought back to life? There's something no human should ever have to do with a gov't agency, or anyone for that matter!
This is nothing new. Read the OIG report A-06-07-27156. Dated June 2008. Web search will turn it up. Marking people as dead all the time
The problem is common enough that anyone with FO and/or TSC experience has dealt with it at one time or another. All the relevant policies are, naturally, SENSITIVE - NOT TO BE SHARED WITH THE PUBLIC.
Yes, erroneous death terminations unfortunately do happen which is why there are procedures for ssa offices to follow to reinstate the records. I know as a former ssa employee, there are multiple inputs required---the payment record, numident record, and medicare record to name some. Then there's a multiple pin input in the critical pmt system to force pmts out to beneficiaries prevent hardship until the payment record is reinstated. It's not a simple fix by any means. And again, this is for an "erroneous" death termination. The fact that DOGE is going in and "intentionally " posting unproven death data to SSA records, (keep in mind that other agencies rely on this data well), is an abuse of power. They are literally falsefying government records. If I did this as an employee, I would have been charged and jailed. The general public should be both outraged and terrified as to what's going on here. I see SSA going under within 5 years. They are already operating with 50% less employees then 20 yrs ago and now DOGE is mandating SSA cut 7000 employees. Never going to work.
Uh, there really is no comparison to people erroneously marked as deceased (and the 2008 OIG report does not reflect systems and policy changes made in the interim and is out of date) and what happened with DOGE doing it in such numbers and damn the consequences. And the fact that the agency has procedures for when it happens also isn't like an ameliorating condition. The fact is DOGE seemingly on a whim marked folks as dead in a way that could terribly impact their financial lives and their response is "if we made a mistake, you fix it". That's just BS.
Marking people as dead all the time when death is proven, sure, however, adding a death to the Numident without evidence of death and using the date of a systems auto input or input date as the date of death, with a made up death certificate number starting with “OAI..” or “DHS..” just doesn’t seem like the right thing to do.
Deliberate misrepresentation and alteration of federal agency records to harm people they don't like? We can't count on the current Dept. of Justice to do its job and hold the record falsifiers accountable. We can publish and save the evidence of who was involved and what they did though for when that changes.
@409. How many employees did SSA have 20 years ago? 40 years ago they had about 80K so are down close to 30 percent from 40 years ago.
SSA considered doing the same thing (entering death for very old with no proof)under Biden in 2023 but didn't because the cost wasn't worth it. There's a 2023 OIG memo.
https://oig.ssa.gov/audit-reports/2023-08-01-numberholders-age-100-or-older-who-did-not-have-death-information-on-the-numident/
12:50, the difference is intent. Sure people have been mistakenly marked as dead and there are systems in place to rectify it. The current admin is intentionally and incorrectly marking them as dead with malice aforethought. That’s some 1984 level BS that should scare the bejesus out of everyone.
If you read SSA’s response to the audit recommendation they state:
We disagree. While we understand OIG's assumption that these individuals are likely deceased, we do not have death information for these individuals. Therefore, we are unable to record the information on these non-beneficiary Numident records. As noted in the report, we previously attempted to develop a methodology to annotate death information on the Numident for non-beneficiaries who have exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancy; however, we found that the possible solutions would have limited or no benefit for the administration of our programs and were too costly to implement. Other entities who rely on death data could consider taking steps for individuals presumed deceased based on age.
SSA clearly states that they do not have the death info and are unable to update the records due to other entities depending on the accuracy of the records. The costliness of developing a methodology is because someone needs to actually look at these cases and make sure the agency is not erroneously terminating someone for death. As the previous poster stated it greatly disadvantages the beneficiary/recipient when that happens. The agency looked into a methodology because they agreed to explore it in response to OIG’s 2015 audit recommendation. They explored it and determined implementing could disadvantage the public, creates inaccuracies for states, financial institutions, etc., and would be costly to have someone review the cases before termination.
Also, if you read their article this wasn’t even about the 100+ folks. This was about DOGE putting dates of death on alive immigrants records to deprive them of resources so they self deport. The 6k+ were entitled to those SSNs due to the Visas granted to them. They’re known to be alive so that is falsifying gov records. When DOGE did this they also included citizens. So both illegal and inhumane.
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