Millions of living Americans were born before Teddy Roosevelt was sworn in as president in 1901, according to the Social Security Administration. The agency’s watchdog, however, thinks they’re probably dead.
A Social Security Administration inspector general report found that 6.5 million people born at least 112 years ago still have active Social Security numbers in the federal database, even though evidence suggests they’re dead. The problem is that working Social Security numbers for dead people enables identity fraud.
Nearly 67,000 of the antique Social Security numbers were misused to report $3.1 billion of income. One number was used on 613 different wage reports, and 194 numbers appeared on at least 50 more from 2006 through 2011. Nearly 4,000 of the ancient numbers were used to apply for work.
“The master death file is highly vulnerable to fraud,” said Leslie Paige, a spokesman for Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonprofit watchdog. “It’s incomplete. It’s not accurate. It leaves the federal government open to losing a lot of money.”
“There’s a whole cadre of people who are making a living peddling these numbers to multiple people,” Paige said. “That’s called organized crime.”
Many entities outside of the Social Security program use the government’s death database to determine the validity of Social Security numbers.
“Even though these identities are not being used to receive Social Security benefits, they can be used for other improper activities, such as filing for benefits from other federal agencies or states, opening bank accounts, or applying for jobs,” the inspector general said.
Officials at the Social Security Administration agreed to look into 5 million of the suspect numbers, but they declined to correct the 1.5 million beneficiaries investigators proved dead, because they don’t receive Social Security payments.
“We may need to be thinking of new ways to safeguard our personal identifiable information,” Paige said. “The Office of Management and Budget is supposed to step in and order the executive branch to do what they need to do. Otherwise, Congress needs to step in and do it by law.”
“It is incredible that the Social Security Administration in 2015 does not have the technical sophistication to ensure that people they know to be deceased are actually noted as dead,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.
Johnson is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.”Making sure Social Security cleans up its death master file to prevent future errors and fraud is a good government reform we can all agree on,” he said.
Investigators found significant evidence that suggest the 6.5 million supercentenarians were dead.
For example, only 42 people worldwide reached age 112 as of September 2014, the Gerontology Research Group found.
The Social Security Administration identified 1.4 million of the individuals who had died, but never properly inputted the information into their database. The average death year for this group was 1959.
“Because so much time had passed since these number holders’ deaths, we could not determine why their death information did not appear on the [database],” the report said.
