> It does also say that many of the numbers without accurate death data aren't being used to pay out, which is why the SSA doesn't bother fixing them (which lea

> It does also say that many of the numbers without accurate death data aren't being used to pay out, which is why the SSA doesn't bother fixing them (which leads to the question of what did cause the payouts to stop?) Mostly, they never started. Likely because the person died a long time ago, in many cases before the Death Master File existed and before claiming benefits, which is why as the OIG report notes, the vast majority of the numebrs in question have no records at all on the MBR, which contains everyone who has claimed beneffits administered by SSA since the 1970s. In other cases, they started when the person was alive and eligible, and ended when social security got death information, which was recorded in the Master Beneficiary Record--where it needs to be to stop payment--but not in Numident. (All this is in the OIG report.) > The reason is that even if SSA isn't paying out their death data is used by the rest of the US government to stop fraudulent payouts for benefits programmes after death Like Social Security, other federal benefits programs do a lot more to verify that the person claiming information is eligible to receive benefits they are claiming then checking whether or not they are listed as dead in Social Security records, both initially and periodically. Social Security numident death information is a secondary check, not a single-source of truth. You want it right or both its primary and secondary uses, but its not the primary way that beneficiaries are validated as being both alive and who they claim to be.