Database Error Costs Social Security Victims $500M

Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Posts reports that the Social Security Administration has agreed to pay more than $500 million in back benefits to more than 80,000 recipients whose benefits were unfairly denied after they were flagged by a federal computer program designed to catch serious criminals. At issue is a 1996 law, which contained language later nicknamed the 'fleeing felon' provision, that said fugitives were ineligible to receive federal benefits. As part of its enforcement, the administration began searching computer databases to weed out people who were collecting benefits and had outstanding warrants. The searches captured dozens of criminals, including some wanted for homicide, but they also ensnared countless elderly and disabled people accused of relatively minor offenses such as shoplifting or writing bad checks and in some cases, the victims simply shared a name and a birth date with an offender." (Read more, below.) "The lead plaintiff in the class-action suit, Rosa Martinez, 52, of Redwood City, Calif., was cut off from her $870 monthly disability benefit check in January 2008 because the system had flagged an outstanding drug warrant in 1980 for a different Rosa Martinez from Miami. Officials said it is difficult to estimate how many social security recipients might be affected by the agreement but said the number is fewer than 1 percent nationally. 'What's remarkable about this case is thesheer number of individuals who were unfairly denied benefits and the size of the financial settlement they will receive,' said David H. Fry of Munger, Tolles & Olson, one of the pro bono attorneys who represented victims."

Comments

Not a database error

[abshack]

This is human error. When will people learn not to make peoples' name the primary key... :/

Re:Not a database error

[chrb]

The problem was not the choice of primary key. The problem was the way in which the people in charge of the process failed to consider the possibility of false positives.

more than 80,000 recipients whose benefits were unfairly denied... The searches captured dozens of criminals

"dozens?" Let's be generous and say 50. 50 out of 80,000 is a 99.9% rate of false positives. Not good.

How on earth...

[Omega Hacker]

Let me get this straight: we're talking about the Social Security Administration, who is responsible for assigning every citizen a unique number which is then used to pay out benefits, and is also used by everybody's dog to act as a unique ID, presumably including the criminal justice system. The very same people who *dole out* these numbers can't be bothered to use them to cross-check whether somebody should stop getting benefits because of this law???

Re:How on earth...

[greed]

The thing about UNIVERSAL public health care is...

It's actually not very important if you correctly identify who is getting health care.

Your doctor needs to know who you are, and lab results need to be correctly tied to samples, and so on. But that's not a function of who's paying the bills.

But for determining if the doctors and labs get paid? Not so much.

Basically, all you really need to know is, "is this person a citizen or lawful immigrant?" and "is this procedure covered by the system?". It's not so important to know WHICH citizen or lawful immigrant. It's nice to get it right, but your medical history doesn't need to be part of your public health insurance ID, so it's not critical to treatment.

Different keying problem.

That being said... I'm amazed at how many people think there's some huge government conspiracy out to get them when they can't get simple stuff like this right. Sure, they can listen in on all cell phone calls... but they can't keep a list properly?

Re:How on earth...

[vux984]

LET'S LET THEM RUN HEALTH CARE NEXT!

Yes, let's.

On the one hand, are you under some delusion that your health insurance company is somehow doing a better job? With greater reliability, efficiency, and accountability? Fewer errors, fewer denied valid claims?? Do you just take it on faith, or do you have any evidence at all that your insurance company is doing a better job?

Re:How on earth...

[rho]

If I had a real point, that would have been one of them. Single-payer proponents all point to a lot of other governments to say how great it is. It's harder to make the case that the U.S. government can do as well. For example, Medicare is enduring severe cost overruns and is rife with corruption.

Nobody ever talks about how great the U.S. government would be. They always say "it's working great in Australia!" Which can be perfectly true, but irrelevant, unless we adopt the Australian system, every jot and tittle--or hire Australia to run our health care system as well.

Defending the SS admins

[hellfire]

Okay, you geeks all confuse me. First you say that by law no one should be using the SSN as a unique identifier except for the SSA itself. Then you ask why aren't people using this unique number to avoid mistakes!!!

I don't blame the SS because they were doing what they were told to do, cut off what someone defined as criminals. The problem was the definition, and how to link SS roles with all these outstanding warrants and whatnot. Are we sure the criminal records all have SSNs? Or could it be that we did a join on some other column and hoped for the best and thought 98% was good enough? I can see a programmer being forced to do the latter by a stupid law. How many John Smiths without proper social security numbers were in the dataset they had to work with?

This was a stupid law to begin with, and probably had some stupid premises to get the information linked up. Never allow a politician to act like a project manager, they'll never get it right.

Re:One would think ....

[StikyPad]

You know, military healthcare in general gets a lot of negative attention, but it's still better than any private program I've ever had. The idea of "death boards" is absolutely ridiculous -- the military will do anything in its power to treat someone, even if it means flying them halfway across the globe. And there's certainly no higher incidence of incompetence in military providers than in the civilian sector, especially when you consider that many military medical personnel moonlight at local clinics and hospitals.

Choosing between a few days of bedrest in a hospital with some peeling paint, making years of payments to cover my deductible/spending cap, or filing for bankruptcy, and in either case possibly losing my coverage and the ability to get new insurance, I'd pick the former. With insurance companies competing based on who can deny the most coverage, and most people unable to even chose their insurers in the first place (in any meaningful way), the state of healthcare in the US has nowhere to go but up.

By 'Social Security victims' do they mean...

[DustoneGT]

the people who are forced to pay into the unsustainable scheme?

Re:Um - No, not yet at least

[avxo]

Except that's not reuse. An EIN is not a social security number. Repeat after me, an EIN is not a social security number! Just because your telephone number is 666-555-1212 and my driver's license number is 666-55-1211 doesn't mean the DMV is reusing telephone numbers as driver's license numbers.

Re:DB indexed on the wrong key, obviously ...

[Attila Dimedici]

Yes, but when a 1500 page bill lands on a congresscritter's desk 2-3 days before the vote, what do you expect?

As someone else replied, I expect them to vote against that 1500 (or 500, or 100 or 2) page bill that they haven't had time to read.