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Government Mistakenly Declares Deaths of Citizens
superbrose writes "According to MSNBC, thousands of U.S. citizens have wrongfully been declared dead, due to an average of 35 data input errors per day by the Social Security Administration (SSA). Many other agencies rely on the data provided by the SSA, such as the IRS. People who have been wrongfully declared dead face many problems, such as rejection of tax returns, cancellation of health insurance, and closure of bank accounts. The article states, 'Input of an erroneous death entry can lead to benefit termination and result in financial hardship for a beneficiary.' Apparently it is far easier to declare a person's death than it is to correct the mistake. It continues, 'Social Security says an erroneous death record can be removed only when it is presented with proof that the original record was entered in error. The original error must be documented, and the deletion must be approved by a supervisor after "pertinent facts supporting reinstatement" are available in the system.'"
Just wait until everybody has ID cards. Having your card cancelled by mistake is going to really ruin your day, month and quite probably, year.
Stuff like this never really makes an impact until somebody important gets hit. I remember one reporter sent a copy of the Minister of Privacy's phone records to her, just to show her how easily you could get ahold of somebody's supposedly private phone records, for just a small fee.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Wouldn't they get a clue if you walked into their main office breathing and all?
Occam's razor has a bureaucratic counterpart: "All things being equal, the solution that means I don't have to do any extra work tends to be the best one."
You're still dead, friend.
yes, we have no bananas
Close, but not quite. Adding more digits just means more places to make a mistake.
The solution is not more digits, but to make social security numbers, nay ALL identifying numbers, self checksumming.
For example when you're shopping online the credit processing system knows immediately when you enter an invalid number because credit card numbers have a check digit (http://www.beachnet.com/~hstiles/cardtype.html). In this instance it seems that miskeying SSNs is a significant part of the problem, having a checksummed number greatly reduces this.
Another aspect is that everyone uses SSNs as identifying numbers. This is bad because, for example, the IRS can only be responsible for data entry faults in its own organization and not those made at the Social Security Administration. Its like Comcast using my Verizon customer number*. You can prevent this to some extent by registering for a taxpayer number to use with the IRS instead of your SSN. Refusing to give your SSN to agencies that request it (when practical) could also help.
*An apt analogy I think, comparing the dinosaurs of inept big government to the dinosaurs of big telecommunications.
I think that it is a good thing that it is easier to declare someone dead than undead. Firstly, people die more often than they come back to life so it is a much more common thing to need to do.
Secondly, in this day and age of identity theft, you don't want to make it too convenient for someone to turn up claiming to be a person that everyone thought was dead. We aren't living in a soap opera, you know!
I think, the GP's point was, Americans today don't care as much — we don't share the Founders' paranoia. Probably, because we have not seen the problem firsthand in too many generations — thanks, no doubt, to the Constitution.
The First Amendment itself is getting chipped away — you can't fake e-mail headers (there goes the anonymous speech, deemed precious on this very forum every time some asshole tries to get away breaking copyrights), and you can't be helping a political candidate too much.
But Americans welcome these laws, because they seem to address an acute problem (spam, lobbyists with too much freedom of speech, etc.). We clearly lost most of that paranoia of 200 years ago... Don't even get me started on the Second Amendment...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If we start seeing government employees as human, then we may have to see the government as an organisation of humans, who can think, reason, and prioritise tasks. It's only small leaps from there to thinking the government actually does it's job, and that the system isn't terminally broken, which, of course, leads people to believe that maybe there are other reasons why the government doesn't agree with them on every issue besides corruption. This kind of thinking leads to a positively frightening sense of social responsibility. It's a slippery slope; don't go there.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.