Massive fraud "red flag”, could also be a matter of data integrity issues. Anyway another example why DOGE is needed.
I feel like Betteridge’s Law of Headlines applies here, too. If Leon had found fire (fraudulent benefits), he would have posted fire instead of smoke.
Or… You know fix our broken social security system that is used as identification. But sure, enabling an unelected Nazi supporting lunatic to strip our government down as he sees fit is an option that makes sense if you’re an uninformed asshole.
Occams razor tells me this is most likely caused by shitty SQL by his teenage goon squad
Nah, I don’t think so. The COBOL explanation sounds more logical to me. Whatever it is - needs to be fixed.
The language wasn’t the point. The point is that if this data is being retrieved by these young clowns, we can’t trust any of it. There is no good excuse for Elon to have given them this much responsibility.
There is no good excuse for that is hasn’t been fixed before (and that includes Trump). You need to know where your tax money is going. Obama told the electorate he was going to slash bureaucracy and wasting tax money but didn’t do it. Apparently you need someone like Musk/Trump. Sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelette, If you are always cautious the media will stop you because they will always find a ‘victim’.
Just because the field exists doesn’t mean it’s critical that it be filled in. We have no idea whether this is even a problem that needs fixing. Maybe a project was underway to fix it until Obama killed it as unnecessary bureaucracy. Bottom line, you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re bitching about.
So death field set to FALSE! and age 140 is proper data? That needs to be fixed. Whatever the reason is. Period. No auditor should accept that.
Did I say 140 is proper data? We don’t know what the fuck it is. We don’t know if the field is even subject to audit - or should be. Assuming these people paid taxes (which they must have to get SS) the IRS would have the birthday. Maybe the field was added at some point as a workflow thing, but the IRS or some other database is the system of record for those dates. Again, we have no fucking idea.
I worked information security at a top five bank, and there were thousands of examples of data fields like this that could be distorted into “red flags” but really didn’t matter at all. Knowing what the system of record is for particular information is critical to proper audits, but proper audits take more time than would serve Elon’s political purposes. That’s a recipe for a trash “audit”.
Garbage in garbage out. I know - I’ve been SME and assisted with data audits myself. This would have definitely not passed the smell test. It needs to be fixed (or addressed as N/A or null) - I’ve seen articles written in 2015 about this.
I mean keeping all the data is needed. Those numbers are tied to people dead or not, you cant reuse them. So yes keeping a record of each number and its accounting was a massive undertaking and was stated when they implemented it.
Fuckin’ loving what DOGE is doing! So fun!
This made me chuckle.
You win!
I’m curious to see how DOGE ends up handling this. Given the scale of potential fraud, you’d probably need a dedicated task force just to help sift through cases and figure out what’s going on. If you do uncover fraud, then you’d need more people to hold the guilty parties accountable. It might take a few years to work through such a huge number of cases, and with more people aging out of the system each year, it’d likely need to be an ongoing effort. You’d basically need to create a whole new fraud agency to deal with this problem, which is ironic given that the IRS already does this and we’re actively trying to downsize them.
Indeed that will be a challenge. I think the DOGE team is great in analyzing data and find inconsistencies and potential fraud. Tricky part is how to fix it. Stopping SS immediately for the most suspected data and wait if someone shows up might be an option, but if that leads to regular people not getting SS that will cause a lot of bad publicity. Until now the electorate in the US is supporting DOGE but that can change.
