Are 150 year olds getting social security payments?
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Hello and thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast. We're the programme that looks at the numbers in the news and in life. And I'm Lizzie McNeill. As we mentioned last week, the Trump administration is featuring a lot in our programmes at the moment. Sorry, we just find them dangling data irresistible.

This week, President Trump was giving another audience to the press about the administration's efforts to cut fraud and unnecessary spending in the US government. He revealed that DOGE, which is the Department for Government Efficiency, had discovered that the United States Social Security Administration, which is the body that deals with the US version of pensions and benefits, had millions of people with live accounts that were over 100 years of age. People that are 120 years old

Up to 129. 3,472,000 people. Wow.

Elon Musk, the head of Doge, doubled down on this. And he later tweeted that... Are Elon and the president correct?

Has Doge uncovered the biggest fraud in history? As you may or may not know, the Trump administration has granted themselves and Doge the rights to access data that administrations usually don't have access to, such as Numident.

Numident, or Numerical Identification System, is the Social Security Administration's computer database file of the information contained in an application for a United States social security number. It contains the name of the applicant, place and date of birth, and other information. The Numident file contains all social security numbers since they were first issued in 1936.

As they were trawling through it, they noticed that millions of people in the database appear to be very old indeed. People from 140 years old to 149 years old.

3,542,000. How many people in what age group there are accepting these social security checks? It's just pretty incredible. People who would have been 120 to 150 years old. So let's fact check this first bit. Are there masses of people aged over 100 in the SSA data sets? And the answer is yes. Yes.

In fact, there are about 18.9 million of them. So what's going on? Is the US inhabited by a ton of sparkly-skinned, pointy-toothed immortals? Vampire. Sadly, no. It is instead down to something decidedly unsexy. Coding practice. The software system has defaults of missing birth dates to more than 150 years ago.

I'm Tim Smeeding, the extinguished professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That's what you say when you're a new retiree. If the Pneuma Dent system has data missing, they default the birth dates to more than 150 years ago, the 20th of May 1875 to be precise, making them all very old toruses. This is odd, but apparently it's actually an international standard, so common practice. Other instances of very old people in the data are due to missing death records.

But none of this was hidden information. But I've been on social security advisory boards before.

I was on the Social Security Modernisation Group in 1992 and so forth, so I know a lot about the programme and the facts were just there. They check every year on things like this. The facts are indeed just there, and they've been just there for quite a while. The topic of the suspicious amount of very, very old people in the SSA system was first pointed out in 2015 by the Inspector General for Social Security, and then again in a follow-up report in 2023.

In both reports, they found that... Now, for context, the amount of people aged over 100 without death records represents... So, Donald Trump and Doge are correct. There are millions of people aged over 100 on the database who have not been signed off as dead...

But they've not discovered this. It was common knowledge. So why wasn't it fixed? Well, the inspector general advised that the agency go through and change all of these records. However, the agency responded that this would cost them upwards of $5 million to do. So the 18.9 million very old, but actually not very old, just mostly dead people remain.

As Musk and the president pointed out, there could be a problem though. As these people do not have a death record attached to the system, they could theoretically be receiving social security payments. ...totalling billions of dollars per month. Except they aren't. The inspector general also covered that in their report. Officials also noted that almost none of the 18.9 million number holders currently receive SSA payments. Almost none means that some do. So who are they?

Fraudsters? Teenage elves? Vampires?

No, they're likely just old people collecting their social security payments. The census for 2023 showed that there were nearly 90,000 people in America aged over 100. And recent data from Pew Research put that number at more than 100,000. If you look at recent SSA data, then you can see that 86,000 people in the 100 and above bracket currently receive social security benefits. Not tens of millions as Elon Musk has suggested. The maths are mathing.

But the fact that a lot of dead people's social security numbers are still active could pose a problem. It does open the door to fraud, just not the type of fraud that would make the agency or government lose money. As the Inspector General's report noted. In tax years 2016 through 2020, employers and individuals reported approximately $8.5 billion in wages, tips and self-employment income using 139,211 SSNs

assigned to individuals aged 100 or older. One security number appeared on 405 different wage reports. So who are these individuals? And why are they using dead people's security numbers? Well, it's normally people who can't get social security numbers. Immigrants. That's been true for years. People come who are immigrants and their employer says, OK, you have to have a social security number. And they put in a number that 1,000 or 2,000 people use.

And they pay in just like everybody else, but they never take it out. That's one of the reasons they're a net plus immigrants in our country.

So the numbers are being used fraudulently, but not to claim benefits. Now, the SSA does have systems in place to try and catch this fraudulent activity. The staff does interviews every year with people 100 and over. They check every year for whoever the designated representative is for a person who's really old or incapacitated or the actual person. They check the death records to make sure.

They're not collecting off of dead people and so forth. I mean, I'm sure you could find a couple of cases where fraud was committed. But the idea that we're going to find there's billions of dollars in overpayments to dead people is just factually wrong.

So, is the SSA a perfect system? Do they never ever waste money? Of course not. There is money wasted from overpayments, underpayments, changes in circumstances. The SSA estimate that 0.85% of all social security payments paid out are what they call improper. This is a small percentage of the total paid out, but it does add up to $71 billion.

The agency managed to claw back $31 million of this in January. So there is wastage, but not because the agency is paying millions of fraudsters the hard-earned pensions of decidedly departed Americans. Yet again, we've been presented data that's being used to construct a reality that isn't actually happening.

Podcaster Trish Regan, who is a loud and proud MAGA supporter, summed up well on Twitter. Sure, clean up the records, but it's critical to present the math correctly. And with that, we leave you. Thanks to Tim Smeeding and all the other experts I spoke to who could not appear on the record this week. If you have any questions or comments, do write in to moreorless at bbc.co.uk. And our Radio 4 series is fast approaching. Let us know what you want covered.

Until next week, goodbye. When you have bars in the sky, onboard showers and award-winning in-flight entertainment, it's no surprise that Emirates was recently named the best airline in the world. We fly you to over 140 destinations and with partners across the globe, we connect you to another 1,700 cities across six continents. So when we say we're also the largest international airline, what we really mean is...

If you're going there, so are we. Book now on Emirates.com. Fly Emirates. Fly better.