13 ms·

Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

jacquesm 3y ago
After the post office scandal you'd think that entities like these would think long and hard about their responsibilities towards the people they interact with.
- wildpeaks 3y ago
  They have no incentive to do anything unless it costs them enough money.
codetrotter 3y ago
> The DfE told the Guardian that once a possible match has been identified, the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link. Sounds like garbage software
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cornholio 3y ago
  I love how an obvious bug that should have led to a rejection of the delivery of the system - or an emergency fix as per the support requirements these large contracts always come with - has instead transformed into official DfE policy. That's just so typical of the newfangled digital bureaucracy: it's far easier to change the workflow than it is to fix the software.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    I think the proper thing is a judge issues and order for them to stop doing that. And when they do it again someone spends a weekend in jail.
    - donalhunt 3y ago
      GDPR has a provision to correct information stored by organisations. It may get interesting once they believe you are dead though because GDPR only applies to living people. :/
  - sorokod 3y ago
    There is a pattern where accountability is outsourced by bureaucrats to software (they are supposed to be accountable for) and the citizens. The Post Office Scandal has a similar theme.
    - cornholio 3y ago
      It's a pretty sweet deal: we can't be responsible for something that the software does, since we are not programmers; meanwhile, the software provider has a thick contract that says he can't be held legally or financially responsible, so he's happy to take the political hit, it's not like it would prevent them from getting another contract in the future. It's like being the Ticketmaster of administrative accountability.
      - sorokod 3y ago
        That is where accountability differs from responsibility. It is the business of the government to make sure that: * the contract with the software vendor is free of the kind of fuckery you mentioned * the product it has signed off on at the end of the processes is fit for purpose. Lawyers and programmers are responsible for crafting contracts and software. The government is accountable for the end result.
  - bananapub 3y ago
    (at least) the UK government outsources things so there are gaps between "notional policy" ("people get paid pensions until they die") and "implemented policy" (Capita fuck up yet another thing) can differ and both sides get to assert it's not their fault.
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    > it's far easier to change the workflow than it is to fix the software This is just something software seems to do. There's a mature and fully-fledged industry in modifying entire workflows to fit software which is implicitly viewed as something that simply is the way it is. Jira and SAP are some obvious big ones, almost with their own priesthoods, but at all levels, "capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say". And let's not forget that the entire capital-C Content industry is completely subservient to the vagaries of "The Algorithms" that are not just considered ineffable by the supplicants, but were in fact specifically designed to be that way.
    - cornholio 3y ago
      I think you will find that with many other types of technology, due to scale and interoperability effects. For example, when the automobile breakthrough happened, manufacturers quickly converged to an "average" design that was cheap to manufacture in large numbers, captured the main strengths of the technology, and happened to suit the average small city, rural or suburban lifestyle where most of the potential customers lived. Now, this machine was not suitable for a small mountain village. Nor was it suitable for dense urban environments. You could design automobiles specifically for those markets - for example, a much more compact closed two seater, that would save fuel, road and parking space. But you couldn't produce it at a scale that could make it profitable against the dominant design, and the clients would face difficulty, risk and even ridicule when using the dominant "big car" infrastructure. So what we got instead was a redesign of the city to suit the dominant technology variant, with what we can confidently say today were disastrous results. Just like your Jira consultants, starting from the 60s an entire cottage industry appeared advising cities on how to correctly plan road infrastructure of sufficient "capacity", how to set minimum parking requirements, etc. If you happen to fall right on the average case of a technology, you gain almost magical benefits and substantial competitive advantages. So your competitors will try to emulate your success even if they don't fit the same pattern. If the interoperability and scale effects are strong, and customization is difficult, we should expect a similar pattern to emerge. And with software, you have both insane scale effects (every copy sold after the first costs zero dollars to make), and strong lock-in effects (file formats and protocols, inherent complexity which leads to a limited talent pool - both your employees and suppliers aren't willing to waste time and effort into a custom technological dead-end for which you are the only potential client etc.).
  - duggan 3y ago
    "Computer says no"[1] has been a hallmark of bureaucracy for some time. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU
- midasuni 3y ago
  It mentions crapita, surely you aren’t surprised?
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  I love how they are trying to push their software issues onto people. Once the person has provided proof once it is the DfE's problem to keep track of that and there is no obligation to keep providing it. At some point, to keep asking to prove something 'or else' may be construed as harassment in addition to being idiotic.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
j7ake 3y ago
Ideally we should using technology to do what we intend to do. Unfortunately the reality is that technology uses us and makes us do things we normally would consider stupid.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- persnickety 3y ago
  Technology doesn't use us, we use technology. Then we make some other we do stupid things. Too many times someone introduces technology to dilute responsibility for me to believe that such outcomes are typically unintentional. Technology totally does what people intend it to do, except the average person is on the receiving side of the whip.
feverzsj 3y ago
[flagged]
- codegladiator 3y ago
  Millions of families suffer every year
mrmanner 3y ago
> letters make no mention of a deadline or the fact that their payments will cease if they do not respond within 28 days. A spokesperson said this was “to avoid causing upset” This is the most stereotypically British thing I’ve heard this year
- Snow_Falls 3y ago
  It's also a blatant lie, the system is broken and the government allows social services to be so bad because it wants to spend as little money on them as possible.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    Not just that. The benefits system has been designed to be hostile and abusive to most claimants. The UK is the country that forces its chronically ill and physically incapable into suicide or death by starvation. These people are "economically unproductive", so the logic of eugenics suggests they should die. https://deathsbywelfare.org/list-view/ https://deathsbywelfare.org/list-view/
    - CapstanRoller 3y ago
      >The UK is the country that forces its chronically ill and physically incapable into suicide or death by starvation. The USA, also, except here it's often done in tents on the street with fentanyl or deaths of despair elsewhere.
    - dotancohen 3y ago
      > forces its chronically ill and physically incapable into suicide What should I be reading to learn more?
      - rvba 3y ago
        Easy imagine a scenario when someone gets ill and lands in a hospital and "the system" does not pay them their money.
radiator 3y ago
> ... asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link. This is a bug in their system. Rather than fixing it, they prefer repeatedly and unashamedly asking old people whether they are dead.
- bananapub 3y ago
  I mean, in a broader sense it isn't a bug. the government outsourced it to Capita explicitly so there's a responsibility gap into which people can fall and lose their money. it's not like these services suck and are hostile to normal people by accident - if the Powers That Be wanted it to not suck then they wouldn't structure systems like this.
  - sorokod 3y ago
    There is no gap, or rather it is artificial and created on purpose. The government is accountable (not responsible, there is a difference) for the entire process to work without any gaps.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  To be fair, there have been several stories (normally "world's oldest person!!!" type) where relatives have been claiming pensions and benefits for sometimes decades after the actual person died. Whether the number of those stories and the amount of money involved is worth the hassle to the people not defrauding governments is left as an exercise to the reader...
  - pydry 3y ago
    To be equally fair, "Crapita" (as private eye calls them) is an incompetent joke that scores government contracts through corruption and then pays the bare minimum (below minimum wage in one case) to the providers of its services. There are lots of examples like the one a above.
    - 3y ago
OJFord 3y ago
> The DfE told the Guardian that once a possible match has been identified, the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link. Well there's your problem. Crapita, I mean. And yet it's completely possible: > After the Guardian queried the process, the DfE said it would make an exception and decouple McGrath’s name from the deceased’s so that she would not be contacted about it again. Even if that was entirely manual...
- TehCorwiz 3y ago
  "After enough public backlash we've fixed the problem for this one person. We hope everyone stops bothering us so we can continue to not fix the problem because denying benefits is profitable to us."
teekert 3y ago
It’s sad and annoying but what an opportunity to call the pension provider and say: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
- eesmith 3y ago
  That might add a bit of fun the first time. This is the fourth.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
Cue the Monty Python skit… https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs
bythreads 3y ago
Just shows how generally unfathomable weird it is that most of the world does not have a uuid for a person assigned at birth - like the nordics do
- Scarblac 3y ago
  In the Netherlands it's not literally a UUID, but everybody does have a number.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Like a SSN in the US? Registering at birth is somewhat trivial outside some edge cases. How do you resign the SSN at death predictably and accurately? Then, do you trust access to this database from 3rd parties? It's turtles all the way down.
nxobject 3y ago
Good to know that the keen eyes here found the key hint halfway through the article, at the end of a paragraph: _Capita_. Leeches on the public purse.
aaronmdjones 3y ago
"Huh, why is this even a difficult thing" > the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link ... and there it is. Crapita, the source of all woes, decided to do a just-good-enough job rather than a good job. Come on. Even DVLA can handle the case where 2 (or more) people have the same first and last name, and middle initial, and date of birth, when issuing driving licences. They don't mix those up.
chokma 3y ago
Swiss pensions for foreigners are also only paid if the recipient proves they are alive once a year. My father had to sent proof of being alive for decades. To be fair, it is much harder to verify this automatically if the recipient lives in another country.
- andrewaylett 3y ago
  That's also different, as it's a known and deliberate process that -- I suspect -- has both a set expectation that the recipient will check in and an explicit reminder before payment is stopped. It is reasonably easy for the pension provider in the case at hand to tell when someone dies. A bit too easy, some might say.
pettycashstash2 3y ago
No recourse to sue for mental anguish? This is like torturing someone to die. Hurry up please and die already etc
justinclift 3y ago
Sounds like there are some ex-Fujitsu or ex-Post Office staff working at Capita.
- mnw21cam 3y ago
  No such thing is necessary. Capita are a "phenomenon" of their very own. The Fujitsu and Post Office managers probably learnt from Capita.
crimbles 3y ago
Barclays closed my mother’s bank accounts because they thought she had died. It was a “clerical error” ie someone had received a death certificate and processed it with about as much rigour as a 2 year old could muster. They sorted it within 5 days though and paid out compensation and sent her a hamper as an apology. Hopefully they fired the moron who kicked off the process too. At the end of the day this shit happens but this should trigger a full review and pause all destructive outcomes immediately as mitigation. But being Capita I doubt it will happen.
- emj 3y ago
  > Hopefully they fired the moron As you say things happens, so who are you going to fire? It mostly is just a bad coincidences that make these things happens, it mostly is not the guy committing the error who is at fault. I do not want to live in a society where you treat the administrative clerks like you imply.
  - crimbles 3y ago
    Bad things should happen at most once. That is the point. To do that you need a culture of improvement which is not evident anywhere I’ve worked in the finance sector.
- jpc0 3y ago
  > Hopefully they fired the moron who kicked off the process too. God forbit you make such a grave mistake as reading a number off a piece of paper and typing it into a system incorrectly. It's almost asif the interaction between the systems is the problem and not the human on the end... It may even have been some sort of "AI" that happened to recognise a letter incorrectly. It's quick to call for people tp be fired, not that you would ever make a simple mistake.
  - crimbles 3y ago
    It’s not a simple mistake. It’s a critically damaging mistake to someone. Any process around such an event requires considerably more competence than what was demonstrated. In this case their investigation said that the date of birth and last name were matched but the first names were not. This was flagged through by someone who didn’t do their job. Thats just negligence of duty. I would expect to be minimally fired if I fucked up and hurt someone.
voytec 3y ago
> vetting procedure that regularly checks pension beneficiaries against the death register to prevent ineligible payments. According to the Department for Education (DfE), which oversees Teachers’ Pensions, death register entries may be matched to scheme members even if personal details differ. Well, that's dumb.
elashri 3y ago
This reminds me of one time I tried to get a birth certificate and I was asked a proof that I was born. Just to make it clear. Not to prove I was born for those particular parents. It is born in general.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  It's more that it is proof that you are who you say you are. I just recently had to order birth certificates from my state. They ask for at least 1 of many different types of proof. For newborns, hospitals release a 'statement of facts' that allow you to order the birth certificate. YMMV.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  If you want to get technical and into some ships of Theseus nonsense, technically, anyone over the age of at least 10 was never born.
methou 3y ago
Every year my grand parents have to take a photo of themselves holding a recent newspaper with date clearly visible to whoever is managing their pension. After the internet and apps plaged the world, now they have to download an app then tilt node and wink to the camera to prove that they are alive. ("If you cannot use a phone, ask your children") I have mixed feeling about this, it's hard to say this is not degenerating, and no one's happy with doing this, but seems like there's no better idea that scales.
- samus 3y ago
  What about a public registry of deaths that can notify parties with justified interest (pension providers, maybe insurances and banks) about such events? That should work for domestic cases at least. Tracking deaths for people living abroad in their retirement is more tricky I admit. Maybe such a registry doesn't exist in the UK to begin with? Since it also doesn't have a residence registry. Edit: my bad, it actually works too well and then they do a bad job at matching records. I should have read TFA first...
  - mucle6 3y ago
    That assumes all deaths are logged. There are strong financial incentives for relatives to hide a death from the government if it means getting a check every month
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      It's quite hard to hide a death in the UK. In hospital all deaths are certified, outside of hospital you have the interesting problem of how to deal with the corpse. And in addition to the death register there are also tax filings (including Council Tax, which is a hefty sum and paid monthly), utilities, and other services that require ID. The media do print occasional Capitalist Gothic stories of people who kept a corpse in their house. But that's incredibly rare and - for obvious reasons - a high price to pay for a monthly cheque.
      - 3y ago
karaterobot 3y ago
> She had fallen victim to a vetting procedure that regularly checks pension beneficiaries against the death register to prevent ineligible payments... the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link. As a consultant, I would be willing to provide a simple fix to this problem for a modest fee. I won't say what it is yet, but I am confident it would work.
cushpush 3y ago
"I'm not dead yet!" - Monthy Python and Holy Grail
thirkle 3y ago
I used to work on Capita's pension systems as my first ever job after uni. Hartlink is an absolutely dreadful system, coded in Progress 4GL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEdge_Advanced_Business_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEdge_Advanced_Business_Lan... Thankfully I have since moved on to greener pastures. Oddest thing about Capita is that they are able to recruit a lot of smart, competent young people, but then put them to work on maintaining the most awful systems.
sega_sai 3y ago
That's the same 'Capita' that had a breach last year: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/04/cyber-attack-to-cost-outsourcing-firm-capita-up-to-25m https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/04/cyber-attac... -- Why am I not surprised...

After the post office scandal you'd think that entities like these would think long and hard about their responsibilities towards the people they interact with.

wildpeaks 3y ago
They have no incentive to do anything unless it costs them enough money.

codetrotter 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cornholio 3y ago
I love how an obvious bug that should have led to a rejection of the delivery of the system - or an emergency fix as per the support requirements these large contracts always come with - has instead transformed into official DfE policy. That's just so typical of the newfangled digital bureaucracy: it's far easier to change the workflow than it is to fix the software.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  I think the proper thing is a judge issues and order for them to stop doing that. And when they do it again someone spends a weekend in jail.
  - donalhunt 3y ago
    GDPR has a provision to correct information stored by organisations. It may get interesting once they believe you are dead though because GDPR only applies to living people. :/
- sorokod 3y ago
  There is a pattern where accountability is outsourced by bureaucrats to software (they are supposed to be accountable for) and the citizens. The Post Office Scandal has a similar theme.
  - cornholio 3y ago
    It's a pretty sweet deal: we can't be responsible for something that the software does, since we are not programmers; meanwhile, the software provider has a thick contract that says he can't be held legally or financially responsible, so he's happy to take the political hit, it's not like it would prevent them from getting another contract in the future. It's like being the Ticketmaster of administrative accountability.
    - sorokod 3y ago
      That is where accountability differs from responsibility. It is the business of the government to make sure that: * the contract with the software vendor is free of the kind of fuckery you mentioned * the product it has signed off on at the end of the processes is fit for purpose. Lawyers and programmers are responsible for crafting contracts and software. The government is accountable for the end result.
- bananapub 3y ago
  (at least) the UK government outsources things so there are gaps between "notional policy" ("people get paid pensions until they die") and "implemented policy" (Capita fuck up yet another thing) can differ and both sides get to assert it's not their fault.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  > it's far easier to change the workflow than it is to fix the software This is just something software seems to do. There's a mature and fully-fledged industry in modifying entire workflows to fit software which is implicitly viewed as something that simply is the way it is. Jira and SAP are some obvious big ones, almost with their own priesthoods, but at all levels, "capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say". And let's not forget that the entire capital-C Content industry is completely subservient to the vagaries of "The Algorithms" that are not just considered ineffable by the supplicants, but were in fact specifically designed to be that way.
  - cornholio 3y ago
    I think you will find that with many other types of technology, due to scale and interoperability effects. For example, when the automobile breakthrough happened, manufacturers quickly converged to an "average" design that was cheap to manufacture in large numbers, captured the main strengths of the technology, and happened to suit the average small city, rural or suburban lifestyle where most of the potential customers lived. Now, this machine was not suitable for a small mountain village. Nor was it suitable for dense urban environments. You could design automobiles specifically for those markets - for example, a much more compact closed two seater, that would save fuel, road and parking space. But you couldn't produce it at a scale that could make it profitable against the dominant design, and the clients would face difficulty, risk and even ridicule when using the dominant "big car" infrastructure. So what we got instead was a redesign of the city to suit the dominant technology variant, with what we can confidently say today were disastrous results. Just like your Jira consultants, starting from the 60s an entire cottage industry appeared advising cities on how to correctly plan road infrastructure of sufficient "capacity", how to set minimum parking requirements, etc. If you happen to fall right on the average case of a technology, you gain almost magical benefits and substantial competitive advantages. So your competitors will try to emulate your success even if they don't fit the same pattern. If the interoperability and scale effects are strong, and customization is difficult, we should expect a similar pattern to emerge. And with software, you have both insane scale effects (every copy sold after the first costs zero dollars to make), and strong lock-in effects (file formats and protocols, inherent complexity which leads to a limited talent pool - both your employees and suppliers aren't willing to waste time and effort into a custom technological dead-end for which you are the only potential client etc.).
- duggan 3y ago
  "Computer says no"[1] has been a hallmark of bureaucracy for some time. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU
midasuni 3y ago
It mentions crapita, surely you aren’t surprised?
mytailorisrich 3y ago
I love how they are trying to push their software issues onto people. Once the person has provided proof once it is the DfE's problem to keep track of that and there is no obligation to keep providing it. At some point, to keep asking to prove something 'or else' may be construed as harassment in addition to being idiotic.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

j7ake 3y ago

Ideally we should using technology to do what we intend to do. Unfortunately the reality is that technology uses us and makes us do things we normally would consider stupid.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
persnickety 3y ago
Technology doesn't use us, we use technology. Then we make some other we do stupid things. Too many times someone introduces technology to dilute responsibility for me to believe that such outcomes are typically unintentional. Technology totally does what people intend it to do, except the average person is on the receiving side of the whip.

feverzsj 3y ago

[flagged]

codegladiator 3y ago
Millions of families suffer every year

mrmanner 3y ago

> letters make no mention of a deadline or the fact that their payments will cease if they do not respond within 28 days. A spokesperson said this was “to avoid causing upset” This is the most stereotypically British thing I’ve heard this year

Snow_Falls 3y ago
It's also a blatant lie, the system is broken and the government allows social services to be so bad because it wants to spend as little money on them as possible.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  Not just that. The benefits system has been designed to be hostile and abusive to most claimants. The UK is the country that forces its chronically ill and physically incapable into suicide or death by starvation. These people are "economically unproductive", so the logic of eugenics suggests they should die. https://deathsbywelfare.org/list-view/ https://deathsbywelfare.org/list-view/
  - CapstanRoller 3y ago
    >The UK is the country that forces its chronically ill and physically incapable into suicide or death by starvation. The USA, also, except here it's often done in tents on the street with fentanyl or deaths of despair elsewhere.
  - dotancohen 3y ago
    > forces its chronically ill and physically incapable into suicide What should I be reading to learn more?
    - rvba 3y ago
      Easy imagine a scenario when someone gets ill and lands in a hospital and "the system" does not pay them their money.

radiator 3y ago

> ... asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link. This is a bug in their system. Rather than fixing it, they prefer repeatedly and unashamedly asking old people whether they are dead.

bananapub 3y ago
I mean, in a broader sense it isn't a bug. the government outsourced it to Capita explicitly so there's a responsibility gap into which people can fall and lose their money. it's not like these services suck and are hostile to normal people by accident - if the Powers That Be wanted it to not suck then they wouldn't structure systems like this.
- sorokod 3y ago
  There is no gap, or rather it is artificial and created on purpose. The government is accountable (not responsible, there is a difference) for the entire process to work without any gaps.
zimpenfish 3y ago
To be fair, there have been several stories (normally "world's oldest person!!!" type) where relatives have been claiming pensions and benefits for sometimes decades after the actual person died. Whether the number of those stories and the amount of money involved is worth the hassle to the people not defrauding governments is left as an exercise to the reader...
- pydry 3y ago
  To be equally fair, "Crapita" (as private eye calls them) is an incompetent joke that scores government contracts through corruption and then pays the bare minimum (below minimum wage in one case) to the providers of its services. There are lots of examples like the one a above.
  - 3y ago

OJFord 3y ago

> The DfE told the Guardian that once a possible match has been identified, the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link. Well there's your problem. Crapita, I mean. And yet it's completely possible: > After the Guardian queried the process, the DfE said it would make an exception and decouple McGrath’s name from the deceased’s so that she would not be contacted about it again. Even if that was entirely manual...

TehCorwiz 3y ago
"After enough public backlash we've fixed the problem for this one person. We hope everyone stops bothering us so we can continue to not fix the problem because denying benefits is profitable to us."

teekert 3y ago

It’s sad and annoying but what an opportunity to call the pension provider and say: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

eesmith 3y ago
That might add a bit of fun the first time. This is the fourth.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

Cue the Monty Python skit… https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs

bythreads 3y ago

Just shows how generally unfathomable weird it is that most of the world does not have a uuid for a person assigned at birth - like the nordics do

Scarblac 3y ago
In the Netherlands it's not literally a UUID, but everybody does have a number.
mlrtime 3y ago
Like a SSN in the US? Registering at birth is somewhat trivial outside some edge cases. How do you resign the SSN at death predictably and accurately? Then, do you trust access to this database from 3rd parties? It's turtles all the way down.

nxobject 3y ago

Good to know that the keen eyes here found the key hint halfway through the article, at the end of a paragraph: _Capita_. Leeches on the public purse.

aaronmdjones 3y ago

"Huh, why is this even a difficult thing" > the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link ... and there it is. Crapita, the source of all woes, decided to do a just-good-enough job rather than a good job. Come on. Even DVLA can handle the case where 2 (or more) people have the same first and last name, and middle initial, and date of birth, when issuing driving licences. They don't mix those up.

chokma 3y ago

Swiss pensions for foreigners are also only paid if the recipient proves they are alive once a year. My father had to sent proof of being alive for decades. To be fair, it is much harder to verify this automatically if the recipient lives in another country.

andrewaylett 3y ago
That's also different, as it's a known and deliberate process that -- I suspect -- has both a set expectation that the recipient will check in and an explicit reminder before payment is stopped. It is reasonably easy for the pension provider in the case at hand to tell when someone dies. A bit too easy, some might say.

pettycashstash2 3y ago

No recourse to sue for mental anguish? This is like torturing someone to die. Hurry up please and die already etc

justinclift 3y ago

Sounds like there are some ex-Fujitsu or ex-Post Office staff working at Capita.

mnw21cam 3y ago
No such thing is necessary. Capita are a "phenomenon" of their very own. The Fujitsu and Post Office managers probably learnt from Capita.

crimbles 3y ago

Barclays closed my mother’s bank accounts because they thought she had died. It was a “clerical error” ie someone had received a death certificate and processed it with about as much rigour as a 2 year old could muster. They sorted it within 5 days though and paid out compensation and sent her a hamper as an apology. Hopefully they fired the moron who kicked off the process too. At the end of the day this shit happens but this should trigger a full review and pause all destructive outcomes immediately as mitigation. But being Capita I doubt it will happen.

emj 3y ago
> Hopefully they fired the moron As you say things happens, so who are you going to fire? It mostly is just a bad coincidences that make these things happens, it mostly is not the guy committing the error who is at fault. I do not want to live in a society where you treat the administrative clerks like you imply.
- crimbles 3y ago
  Bad things should happen at most once. That is the point. To do that you need a culture of improvement which is not evident anywhere I’ve worked in the finance sector.
jpc0 3y ago
> Hopefully they fired the moron who kicked off the process too. God forbit you make such a grave mistake as reading a number off a piece of paper and typing it into a system incorrectly. It's almost asif the interaction between the systems is the problem and not the human on the end... It may even have been some sort of "AI" that happened to recognise a letter incorrectly. It's quick to call for people tp be fired, not that you would ever make a simple mistake.
- crimbles 3y ago
  It’s not a simple mistake. It’s a critically damaging mistake to someone. Any process around such an event requires considerably more competence than what was demonstrated. In this case their investigation said that the date of birth and last name were matched but the first names were not. This was flagged through by someone who didn’t do their job. Thats just negligence of duty. I would expect to be minimally fired if I fucked up and hurt someone.

voytec 3y ago

> vetting procedure that regularly checks pension beneficiaries against the death register to prevent ineligible payments. According to the Department for Education (DfE), which oversees Teachers’ Pensions, death register entries may be matched to scheme members even if personal details differ. Well, that's dumb.

elashri 3y ago

This reminds me of one time I tried to get a birth certificate and I was asked a proof that I was born. Just to make it clear. Not to prove I was born for those particular parents. It is born in general.

mlrtime 3y ago
It's more that it is proof that you are who you say you are. I just recently had to order birth certificates from my state. They ask for at least 1 of many different types of proof. For newborns, hospitals release a 'statement of facts' that allow you to order the birth certificate. YMMV.
withinboredom 3y ago
If you want to get technical and into some ships of Theseus nonsense, technically, anyone over the age of at least 10 was never born.

methou 3y ago

Every year my grand parents have to take a photo of themselves holding a recent newspaper with date clearly visible to whoever is managing their pension. After the internet and apps plaged the world, now they have to download an app then tilt node and wink to the camera to prove that they are alive. ("If you cannot use a phone, ask your children") I have mixed feeling about this, it's hard to say this is not degenerating, and no one's happy with doing this, but seems like there's no better idea that scales.

samus 3y ago
What about a public registry of deaths that can notify parties with justified interest (pension providers, maybe insurances and banks) about such events? That should work for domestic cases at least. Tracking deaths for people living abroad in their retirement is more tricky I admit. Maybe such a registry doesn't exist in the UK to begin with? Since it also doesn't have a residence registry. Edit: my bad, it actually works too well and then they do a bad job at matching records. I should have read TFA first...
- mucle6 3y ago
  That assumes all deaths are logged. There are strong financial incentives for relatives to hide a death from the government if it means getting a check every month
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    It's quite hard to hide a death in the UK. In hospital all deaths are certified, outside of hospital you have the interesting problem of how to deal with the corpse. And in addition to the death register there are also tax filings (including Council Tax, which is a hefty sum and paid monthly), utilities, and other services that require ID. The media do print occasional Capitalist Gothic stories of people who kept a corpse in their house. But that's incredibly rare and - for obvious reasons - a high price to pay for a monthly cheque.
    - 3y ago

karaterobot 3y ago

> She had fallen victim to a vetting procedure that regularly checks pension beneficiaries against the death register to prevent ineligible payments... the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link. As a consultant, I would be willing to provide a simple fix to this problem for a modest fee. I won't say what it is yet, but I am confident it would work.

cushpush 3y ago

"I'm not dead yet!" - Monthy Python and Holy Grail

thirkle 3y ago

I used to work on Capita's pension systems as my first ever job after uni. Hartlink is an absolutely dreadful system, coded in Progress 4GL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEdge_Advanced_Business_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEdge_Advanced_Business_Lan... Thankfully I have since moved on to greener pastures. Oddest thing about Capita is that they are able to recruit a lot of smart, competent young people, but then put them to work on maintaining the most awful systems.

sega_sai 3y ago

That's the same 'Capita' that had a breach last year: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/04/cyber-attack-to-cost-outsourcing-firm-capita-up-to-25m https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/04/cyber-attac... -- Why am I not surprised...