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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Even one fraudulent welfare check is too many. I think we can all agree with that.[/quote]

First, Retirement isn’t welfare. It’s an entitlement you paid for by working.

And if you want want a zero percent error rate, you can’t cut SSA staffing and the budget below 1980s levels while we deal with baby boomers retiring.  It takes time, manpower and decent software— not running on on COBOL— to check on tens of millions of people. Some of our databases haven’t been updated with new software in 40+ years.  That’s a Congress problem. We can’t by software if they don’t appropriate the funds. Plus, this isn’t just a SSA issue.   Treasury is also responsible for gathering this data.

SSA tries to maintain a 1% error rate. And most years does. I think last year was about .75%. And SSA does a decent job recovering overpayments and has toughened up on getting overpayments back the last couple of years. But, you can’t get blood from a stone. And we are so understaffed we were not FORK eligible and are not or VERA eligible (unlike, say, nuclear weapons monitors and ATC). You want 0% to be 1%— staff us up. And realize that it costs more in manpower to ferret out the .75%— sending people to nursing homes to verify that 105 years are still alive— than it does to overpay.  The price of perfect is multiples of the price or really good.

Also, SSA s systems are strange, incredibly outdated, pull this data from multiple places and sometimes use unknown fields and use data from multiple databases. As an example, if an exact birthday is not known (born at home 80 years ago) the number is set to 150 years ago (in this case 1875).

TL; DR— the data isn’t saying what Elon thinks it is. Which is why you don’t parachute. 20 year olds with no background in our programs in to run a couple queries and play gotcha.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/feb/17/are-150-year-old-americans-receiving-social-securi/

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