5 ms·
To be fair, there have been several stories (normally "world's oldest person!!!" type) where relatives have been claiming pensions and benefits for sometimes de
by 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 agoTo 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.
- flir 3y ago> as private eye calls them ...and their customers... suppliers... partners... employees...
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoCrapita costs the UK far, far, far, far more than "dead" pensioner fraud does.
- wslh 3y agoTo be more fair: it is easy to check if they are alive or not. This is not rocket science.
- userbinator 3y agoIn these times, it is only easy in-person.
- otikik 3y agoSo is to add an extra field “different deceased person with same name”
- gruez 3y agoHow is it easy? How do you make sure the old person in front of you is really the pensioner and not her 80 year old daughter?
- wslh 3y agoSorry, but we have not doing this for centuries if not milleniums for trillion of people before us?
- lazide 3y agoWe haven’t at this scale, no. For most of human existence, you would already know if Bob or Jane was dead, since you’d have gone to their funeral or knew someone who had.
- wslh 3y agoSorry, I am missing something. Are you saying that the people that are dying every day, in the developed world, is uncounted by a big margin? What is that margin?
- Macha 3y agoJapan estimated 5% in 2006, for one data point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi
- wslh 3y agoJapan is Japan [1]. What is your data point for European and American countries? [1] https://hansondoremus.com/2014-4-28-there-are-four-kinds-of-countries-in-the-world/ https://hansondoremus.com/2014-4-28-there-are-four-kinds-of-...
- lazide 3y agoYou’re asking for the concrete number of people who are dead, but the folks in the system don’t know it? And where there is a financial incentive for recipients to hide this fact? That’s about as (actually) knowable as how many folks in LA are drug dealers. We know some are, clearly, since they’ve been caught. But that is not going to be even close to correct in real terms, because they are of course going to work very hard to not get caught. https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/fact-sheet-how-much-waste-fraud-and-abuse-there-social-security https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/fact-sheet-how-much-wast... States “ According to the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General, in 2013 just over 1,500 deceased individuals in all age ranges were still receiving benefits. They account for only $15 million in improper benefit payments.” And “According to the Social Security Administration, all improper payments, including payments to the deceased and the very old, are estimated at about $3 billion per year.” That is in the US. And the SSA is really aggressive in trying to track down these issues. Most other pensions don’t have their resources or the type of political pressure they get. I’ve personally overheard enough discussions among old folks to know that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg though, anymore than arresting Bob for possessing coke is ‘stopping drug trafficking’.
- m-p-3 3y agoHow do you reliably do it at a massive scale? Other than using some kind of biometrics, there's the possibility of impersonation.
- pjmorris 3y agoThey send pension checks out to specific addresses and accounts at exactly the same scale. Does it seem unreasonable to add 'attempt to call the pensioner' into the 'maybe they are deceased' part of the verification protocol?
- acdha 3y ago“Massive scale” is a distraction because society is even more massive. For example, if you’re talking about school pensions you have a school system with employees and that means you could do things like have someone check ID in person, and perhaps require a non-relative witness if there’s any question. Doctors offices could similarly be enlisted to certify that person X is the patient they’ve been seeing. The problem with this is simply that it’s not absolutely free, and the people promising savings through outsourcing need it to be free to make their promises happen. Cutting budgets everywhere removes the slack you need to deal with things like this.
- jacquesm 3y agoYou'd think if they are able to reliable set up a contribution scheme that works at scale that they could set up a system to ensure they only pay out to individuals that are still alive. The possibility of impersonation isn't limited to pension pay-outs but many other things as well. A once-per-year on-site visit would work and would just be a cost-of-business item, and that cost could be lowered substantially by collaborating with other entities who take an interest in such information (banks, governments etc).
- breezeTrowel 3y agoSimple. The article states they use the UK's death registry. The problem is they have no way to flag an erroneous match for longer than 12 months.
- cracadumi 3y agoReminds me of Sogen Kato's story : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato
- itronitron 3y agohmm, I wonder how long it will be until someone makes a 'pensioner-bot' that passes for a deceased relative.
- bachmeier 3y agoTo be fair? That's like saying "To be fair, some people try to steal money from banks, so it's okay if the ATM sometimes doesn't work."
- ajross 3y agoMore like, "some people try to commit fraud, so banks are required to implement AML/KYC processes to make the attack more difficult". Repeatedly asserting one is not dead is, if you think about it, more or less analogous to the documentation requirements for managing a large account at an investment bank. Is it the best solution? Likely not. But the problem is real and does demand a solution of some form.
- logifail 3y ago> Is it the best solution? Likely not. But the problem is real and does demand a solution of some form. From the original article: "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. 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." The problem is with the approach in attempting to reduce fraud. Once a false positive from an incomplete match from the death register is proven false - when the pension recipient tells you they are still alive - you don't need to check up on that same incomplete match every 12 months, because you already know it's false. Demanding "a solution of some form" completely misunderstands the problem and is the same approach that gave us the Post Office scandal.
- ajross 3y ago> same approach that gave us the Post Office scandal. I don't follow? This is just a data quality problem. Should it be fixed? Obviously. But everyone deals with bad data. You can't fix that, you just optimize around it. The Post Office scandal was emphatically NOT about a data quality problem. It was that they were criminally prosecuting people to cover up their data quality problem. Again, everyone has bad data.
- PaulHoule 3y agoI think had relatives in Poland in the 1980s who were collecting social security for a dead person. The U.S. has a database of social security numbers of the deceased which is quite interesting for a few reasons. It is closely guarded because social security numbers are assigned sequentially by geographic region so if you know someone’s SSN you can get their date of birth or vice versa. If you manage to get in that database you are really in trouble because every financial institution has a copy of that list and there is no procedure to get you off. It is quite literally a “financial death sentence.”
- Spooky23 3y agoClosely guarded? It’s not available to the public. There’s probably a few million people who can access the death register in some capacity. SSNs aren’t secure credentials without validation, period.
- withinboredom 3y ago> because social security numbers are assigned sequentially by geographic region so if you know someone’s SSN you can get their date of birth or vice versa. This has been false for decades. (early '90s, I think?)
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoIf it stopped being true in 1990, then it remains true for anybody over the age of 34, which is not exactly a small chunk of the population. (Though yes it's a good thing they stopped doing sequential numbers) Edit: https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomizationfaqs.html https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomizationfaqs.html seems to say that the change was only implemented in 2011, which would mean that even more of the population is unaffected.
- withinboredom 3y agoMy sisters were born after 1990, and they have random ssn's ... especially compared to my brother and I who were born before 1990 (we were all born in the same city). I think the scheme implemented in 2011 is a more random one than the previous scheme or maybe it wasn't implemented everywhere before 2011, and took 20 years to implement (which is also believable).
- SkeuomorphicBee 3y agoThat is throwing the baby out with the bath water. The amount of fraud doesn't justify creating such burden on users. The problem is there is a market failure in the form of misaligned interests (the provider's best interest is to make the process as difficult as possible, not only to curb fraud, but also to avoid paying actual customers). This can only be fixed with government oversight and steep fines (so steep that they are more expensive than doing right by their customers).
- frutiger 3y ago> The problem is there is a market failure in the form of misaligned interests Misaligned interests don’t create market failures. Usually imperfect information or costs/benefits borne by third parties do.
- zimpenfish 3y ago> This can only be fixed with government oversight It's a system contracted out from UKGOV being administered on behalf of UKGOV. If government oversight worked, it would have worked already, surely?
- dazc 3y agoReminded of the story where a dead body was taken to a post office in Ireland in an attempt to withdraw pension money... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60091753 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60091753
- Simon_ORourke 3y agoTrue, and colloquially much of the longevity attributed to countries like Japan may have some basis in this type of fraud. However, every bill comes due eventually and you typically need to present a death certificate in most countries or answer one of these proof of life surveys.