4 ms·

It all boils down to what you consider more likely. Someone not quite understanding the data they're looking at or that nobody noticed several tens of millions

It all boils down to what you consider more likely. Someone not quite understanding the data they're looking at or that nobody noticed several tens of millions of dead people receiving social security. Whichever it is I would be very careful before making any grand public statements about it. And as far as fraud goes this doesn't sound anywhere near sophisticated.

mike_hearn 2y ago
Those aren't the only two possibilities. I guess it depends on how much prior knowledge someone has of such problems. The correct explanation isn't "nobody noticed", it's "people noticed but could not/would not do anything about it". But how much you know about these problems will depend where you get your news from. If you never read right wing sources, you aren't exposed to stories about benefits/grants fraud as places like the Guardian or CNN just don't cover it, so all this will appear fantastical and absurd. If you're used to such stories then it all seems plausible and normal. These types of things usually have some aspects in common. One is that front line workers, when asked in a safe environment, will give enormous estimates for how much of their payout is fraudulent. The people who are in denial about it are usually the people at the top, not the bottom. They don't ask, nobody tells, they don't want to know because they'll be held accountable for it and they fundamentally, ideologically, do not care about waste or inefficiency, viewing it as preferable to even one innocent person not getting their money. I can't find it now but Musk has alleged similar things; he got private estimates from civil servants that 50% of the payouts from their department were probably fraud of some kind (it might not have been SS, I don't remember), and that the staff in charge of blocking payments at the Treasury were told to never do so. This kind of thing is what you'd expect. Often the front line civil servants are frustrated by this situation, as it's their taxes being wasted too. It's the people at the top who cover it up.
- contravariant 2y ago
  And in what scenario would it be a good idea to give all defrauders a heads-up instead of going after potentially millions of them?
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Those two aren't incompatible! When you discover financial fraud - in any context - you send the evidence that alerted you to the fraud to the police so they can build a prosecution case, and then cut off the money. Stopping the money flow doesn't stop anyone from prosecuting fraud that happened in the past.
    - contravariant 2y ago
      What worries me is that neither of those are mentioned to have taken place. And if they had I would expect more detailed 'proof' than the single simplest SQL query one could think of. Or actually I wouldn't expect any public statements at all. Scoring quick political points is nowhere near worth endangering the legal cases. Which could not be anywhere close to even identifying the alleged fraudsters in such a short amount of time. You seem quite happy to find reasons for something you expected to be true. Like I was happy to know he made a silly mistake with epochs. Excited by this I quickly tried and unfortunately succeeded to falsify that information. Could you do me a favour and try the same with your read of events?
      - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
        Well it wouldn't be SQL they used as Musk tweeted recently when someone mentioned SQL that: > "This retard thinks the government uses SQL" URL provided because if the country can be saved your first reaction should still be "No way that actually happened!", but it did: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961 Tweet submitted for HN discussion here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078219
        contravariant 2y ago
        Skepticism is obviously going to be my first response. I was arguing it should be yours as well. And you seem to want to go off-topic, again, but what idiot would believe the U.S. government doesn't use SQL? The U.S. government is the direct cause of the creation of SQL.
- abrahamepton 2y ago
  Assuming that the age field is the only thing being used for determining payouts is really wildly naive. If you wanted to game SSA, this would be the dumbest and easiest-to-catch way to do it. Your other garbage about how frontline worker estimates of fraud being large means the fraud itself must be large bespeak a silly person who’s already reached the conclusion he wants. All your conspiracy theorizing sounds like a person marinating in right wing garbage news sites for a while. Sorry to your family.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Dumb and easy to catch, yes you're right, and yet it happens all the time. An example from the UK [1]: (Feb 2025) Bereaved families asked to return pension overpayments Over the past five years, the DWP mistakenly paid more than £500m in state pensions and pension credits to the deceased, recovering about half from bereaved relatives. They can't prosecute this because it's not fraud if someone just gives you money and then later realizes it was a mistake. So they must resort to asking the families if they'd kindly return the money. You say the age field isn't the only thing being used to determine payouts - obviously that's true, there is also the is_dead field. These systems are about giving you money after a certain age until you die. If those fields are inaccurate then the money paid out will also be inaccurate. It's unfortunate you got so personal at the end there. There's no conspiracy being theorized anywhere here. Just a lack of care when it comes to other people's money. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5eeexex9o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5eeexex9o
- enragedcacti 2y ago
  I found it for you. The number was "about half" of the $100B/year to individuals with no SSN or temp ID, and the source was "the consensus in the room" in a meeting with treasury. I find basically every aspect of the statement to be extremely suspect given the general vagueness of it, to the fact that a good portion of "the room" were likely his people, to Elon's general penchant for stretching the truth, but even if we take it at face value he isn't saying what you think he's saying. it's closer to: "His team and some higher-ups at Treasury guesstimated that at least half of a very high risk category of payments, making up roughly 1.3% of total entitlement spending, are obvious fraud" > One is that front line workers, when asked in a safe environment, will give enormous estimates for how much of their payout is fraudulent. I would love to see a real source for this and what kind of information they were using to make those estimates. > They don't ask, nobody tells, they don't want to know because they'll be held accountable for it and they fundamentally, ideologically, do not care about waste or inefficiency, viewing it as preferable to even one innocent person not getting their money. This is a wildly uncharitable interpretation. A more reasonable one, and one that you will see echoed throughout research on this topic, is that enforcement itself needs to go through a cost-benefit analysis. We can always invest more to catch more fraud, but at what point are we spending more money than we are recovering, and what was the human cost of delays or erroneous denials for eligible individuals. The alternative is itself a wasteful mindset that cares more about punishing evildoers than it does about stretching tax dollars or providing for those less fortunate as the law demands. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/elon-musk-alleges-50b-fraud-treasury-judge-blocks-doge-audit https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/elon-musk-alleges-50b-f...
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    > The alternative is itself a wasteful mindset that cares more about punishing evildoers than it does about stretching tax dollars or providing for those less fortunate as the law demands. Yes, I've encountered a person recently on this forum who had taken the position that even a single case of fraud is unacceptable; it's better to waste an infinite amount of money to catch all fraud, than to have a program at all if the alternative is to tolerate any level of fraud. I tried to engage them on the futility of this but they insisted it was a matter of morality to stamp out said fraud, because not doing so encouraged it.

mike_hearn 2y ago

Those aren't the only two possibilities. I guess it depends on how much prior knowledge someone has of such problems. The correct explanation isn't "nobody noticed", it's "people noticed but could not/would not do anything about it". But how much you know about these problems will depend where you get your news from. If you never read right wing sources, you aren't exposed to stories about benefits/grants fraud as places like the Guardian or CNN just don't cover it, so all this will appear fantastical and absurd. If you're used to such stories then it all seems plausible and normal. These types of things usually have some aspects in common. One is that front line workers, when asked in a safe environment, will give enormous estimates for how much of their payout is fraudulent. The people who are in denial about it are usually the people at the top, not the bottom. They don't ask, nobody tells, they don't want to know because they'll be held accountable for it and they fundamentally, ideologically, do not care about waste or inefficiency, viewing it as preferable to even one innocent person not getting their money. I can't find it now but Musk has alleged similar things; he got private estimates from civil servants that 50% of the payouts from their department were probably fraud of some kind (it might not have been SS, I don't remember), and that the staff in charge of blocking payments at the Treasury were told to never do so. This kind of thing is what you'd expect. Often the front line civil servants are frustrated by this situation, as it's their taxes being wasted too. It's the people at the top who cover it up.

contravariant 2y ago
And in what scenario would it be a good idea to give all defrauders a heads-up instead of going after potentially millions of them?
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Those two aren't incompatible! When you discover financial fraud - in any context - you send the evidence that alerted you to the fraud to the police so they can build a prosecution case, and then cut off the money. Stopping the money flow doesn't stop anyone from prosecuting fraud that happened in the past.
  - contravariant 2y ago
    What worries me is that neither of those are mentioned to have taken place. And if they had I would expect more detailed 'proof' than the single simplest SQL query one could think of. Or actually I wouldn't expect any public statements at all. Scoring quick political points is nowhere near worth endangering the legal cases. Which could not be anywhere close to even identifying the alleged fraudsters in such a short amount of time. You seem quite happy to find reasons for something you expected to be true. Like I was happy to know he made a silly mistake with epochs. Excited by this I quickly tried and unfortunately succeeded to falsify that information. Could you do me a favour and try the same with your read of events?
    - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
      Well it wouldn't be SQL they used as Musk tweeted recently when someone mentioned SQL that: > "This retard thinks the government uses SQL" URL provided because if the country can be saved your first reaction should still be "No way that actually happened!", but it did: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889062581848944961 Tweet submitted for HN discussion here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078219
      - contravariant 2y ago
        Skepticism is obviously going to be my first response. I was arguing it should be yours as well. And you seem to want to go off-topic, again, but what idiot would believe the U.S. government doesn't use SQL? The U.S. government is the direct cause of the creation of SQL.
abrahamepton 2y ago
Assuming that the age field is the only thing being used for determining payouts is really wildly naive. If you wanted to game SSA, this would be the dumbest and easiest-to-catch way to do it. Your other garbage about how frontline worker estimates of fraud being large means the fraud itself must be large bespeak a silly person who’s already reached the conclusion he wants. All your conspiracy theorizing sounds like a person marinating in right wing garbage news sites for a while. Sorry to your family.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Dumb and easy to catch, yes you're right, and yet it happens all the time. An example from the UK [1]: (Feb 2025) Bereaved families asked to return pension overpayments Over the past five years, the DWP mistakenly paid more than £500m in state pensions and pension credits to the deceased, recovering about half from bereaved relatives. They can't prosecute this because it's not fraud if someone just gives you money and then later realizes it was a mistake. So they must resort to asking the families if they'd kindly return the money. You say the age field isn't the only thing being used to determine payouts - obviously that's true, there is also the is_dead field. These systems are about giving you money after a certain age until you die. If those fields are inaccurate then the money paid out will also be inaccurate. It's unfortunate you got so personal at the end there. There's no conspiracy being theorized anywhere here. Just a lack of care when it comes to other people's money. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5eeexex9o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5eeexex9o
enragedcacti 2y ago
I found it for you. The number was "about half" of the $100B/year to individuals with no SSN or temp ID, and the source was "the consensus in the room" in a meeting with treasury. I find basically every aspect of the statement to be extremely suspect given the general vagueness of it, to the fact that a good portion of "the room" were likely his people, to Elon's general penchant for stretching the truth, but even if we take it at face value he isn't saying what you think he's saying. it's closer to: "His team and some higher-ups at Treasury guesstimated that at least half of a very high risk category of payments, making up roughly 1.3% of total entitlement spending, are obvious fraud" > One is that front line workers, when asked in a safe environment, will give enormous estimates for how much of their payout is fraudulent. I would love to see a real source for this and what kind of information they were using to make those estimates. > They don't ask, nobody tells, they don't want to know because they'll be held accountable for it and they fundamentally, ideologically, do not care about waste or inefficiency, viewing it as preferable to even one innocent person not getting their money. This is a wildly uncharitable interpretation. A more reasonable one, and one that you will see echoed throughout research on this topic, is that enforcement itself needs to go through a cost-benefit analysis. We can always invest more to catch more fraud, but at what point are we spending more money than we are recovering, and what was the human cost of delays or erroneous denials for eligible individuals. The alternative is itself a wasteful mindset that cares more about punishing evildoers than it does about stretching tax dollars or providing for those less fortunate as the law demands. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/elon-musk-alleges-50b-fraud-treasury-judge-blocks-doge-audit https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/elon-musk-alleges-50b-f...
- ModernMech 2y ago
  > The alternative is itself a wasteful mindset that cares more about punishing evildoers than it does about stretching tax dollars or providing for those less fortunate as the law demands. Yes, I've encountered a person recently on this forum who had taken the position that even a single case of fraud is unacceptable; it's better to waste an infinite amount of money to catch all fraud, than to have a program at all if the alternative is to tolerate any level of fraud. I tried to engage them on the futility of this but they insisted it was a matter of morality to stamp out said fraud, because not doing so encouraged it.