6.5M people with active
Social Security numbers are 112 or older: IG, Agency
urged to update its files By Jessica Chasmar - The Washington Times - Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Roughly 6.5 million people with
active Social Security numbers are age 112 and older, according to an audit by
the Social Security Administration’s inspector general.
The March 4 audit concluded that the administration “did not have controls in place to annotate death
information” on the the main electronic file, called Numident, for Social
Security numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies and
were likely deceased.
“We obtained Numident
data that identified approximately 6.5 million numberholders born before June
16, 1901 who did not have a date of death on their record,” the report states.
The inspector general
said the questionable identification numbers put the government at risk of
fraud and waste. Some of the numbers assigned to long-dead people were used
fraudulently to open bank accounts, and thousands of numbers were apparently
used by illegal immigrants to apply for work, CNS News reported.
“During Calendar Years
2008 through 2011, SSA received 4,024
E-Verify inquiries using the SSNs of 3,873 number holders born before June 16,
1901,” the report said. “These inquiries indicate individuals’ attempts to use
the SSNs to apply for work.”
Sens. Ron Johnson,
Wisconsin Republican, and Tom Carper, Delaware Democrat, who head the Senate
committee that oversees the Social Security
Administration, issued a joint statement Monday urging the agency to clean
up its files, CNS News reported.
“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,” Mr. Johnson
said. “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.”
Mr. Carper agreed,
saying eliminating such errors by simply keeping track of who has died is a
“relatively simple problem that the government should pursue as a high
priority.”
The inspector general
made recommendations to the administration for resolving the
discrepancies and correcting its death records, but the agency disagreed.
“The recommendations
would create a significant manual and labor-intensive workload and provide no
benefit to the administration of our programs,”
Social Security management said in a response to the review, The Washington
Post reported.
The agency agreed to
other proposals, including one to resolve cases in which multiple individuals
are using the same Social Security number.
“SSA stated that, while it
had concerns about the resource impact and error risk of correcting very old
non-beneficiary records, it would explore the legal and technical feasibility,
as well as the cost, to establish an automated process to update these
records,” the report said. “SSA agreed to complete its
analysis by the end of FY 2015.”
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