With "death" flag set to false - sure. But are they collecting benefits / are they active in any way? Otherwise it's just that the death may not have been recor

With "death" flag set to false - sure. But are they collecting benefits / are they active in any way? Otherwise it's just that the death may not have been recorded. If Elon Musk wanted to be honest, he should've published a statistic like that, but with SSNs that seem still active. There were around ~1M (if not more) unidentified bodies found in the States over the last 100 years. On top of that, before digitisation, you've had mistakes in filling the data, lost documents and a ton of other possible causes for not marking someone as dead in SSN. As long as they are not collecting benefits, it's more hassle to fix than it's worth. In a bit similar spirit - in Poland we're considering turning public health insurance into just a tax, and doing blanket assumption that every citizen has health insurance. Since we have less than 1% uninsured, the costs of tracking and verification are comparable/higher than just giving "free" insurance to the remaining 1%.