Social Security records compromised?

 NY Post:

Tesla and X CEO-turned-special government employee Elon Musk claimed to have uncovered “the biggest fraud in history” when he stumbled across more than 20 million people listed in the Social Security database as over 100 years old.

“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!” Musk posted on X late Sunday, showing a chart of ages ranging from zero to 369 years old.

“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” he joked, adding that “there are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security [sic] numbers than there are citizens in the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history.”

However, Musk’s bombshell has long been known by the Social Security Administration (SSA) watchdog, which released an audit in July 2023 showing that 18.9 million people listed as 100 years or older — but not dead — were in the database.

Only 86,000 people living in the US at the time were actually centenarians, according to the Census Bureau.

The same inspector general’s office found in a March 2015 audit that 6.5 million people with Social Security numbers but no death information were over 112 years old — despite just 35 people on the planet having reached that ripe old age.

In both audits, the inspectors general concluded that “almost none” were actually cashing Social Security checks — despite the glaring accounting errors identifying people born in 1886 and 1893 as still living, in two extreme cases.

Roughly 18.4 million uncovered in the 2023 audit had not received benefits or reported income for 50 years, meaning they were likely dead.

“We believe it likely SSA did not receive or record most of the 18.9 million individuals’ death information primarily because the individuals died decades ago — before the use of electronic death reporting,” the report states.

Around 44,000 were actually receiving benefits, with 13 of those older than 112.

The oldest living man in the world — Salustiano Sanchez-Blazquez, a 112-year-old self-taught musician, coal miner and gin rummy aficionado from western New York — had died months after the first audit began.
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Getting the zombies off the Social Security rolls should not be that hard.  There should also be an investigation of actually who is cashing the Social Security accounts for people who are deceased.