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TL;DR: Rumors have been circulating about thousands and thousands of deceased people allegedly receiving Social Safety checks. Nonetheless, this sensational declare is much from the reality. The actual story is a fancy interaction between growing older expertise, authorities programs, and misinterpretations by youthful IT professionals, notably these within the Division of Authorities Effectivity, or DOGE.
The rumors started when Elon Musk claimed {that a} vital variety of People over the age of 100 have been inappropriately receiving advantages. Musk and different DOGE representatives stated that they had uncovered “uncommon occurrences” throughout their preliminary evaluation of Social Safety. Musk went as far as to claim that people as outdated as 150 have been listed as profit recipients. He later expanded on these claims, stating that over 20 million American centenarians have been receiving Social Safety funds. Musk shared a picture on X of what he described as a spreadsheet from a Social Safety database to assist his argument.
The actual culprit, although, is a programming language that has been the spine of the Social Safety Administration for many years.
Developed within the Nineteen Fifties, COBOL powers vital features inside the SSA, together with processing retirement and incapacity claims. The administration maintains a formidable 60 million traces of COBOL code.
In accordance with the Social Safety database, these are the numbers of individuals in every age bucket with the loss of life discipline set to FALSE!
Possibly Twilight is actual and there are lots of vampires gathering Social Safety 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/ltb06VX98Z
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025
One in every of COBOL’s peculiarities is its lack of a standardized methodology for dealing with dates. This limitation has led programmers to plot inventive options for representing dates in authorities databases, together with using placeholder dates for unknown data.
In accordance with Manjeet Rege, a professor of information science and software program engineering on the College of St. Thomas Faculty of Engineering, Might 20, 1875, is a generally used placeholder date. This date marks the start of time in keeping with the ISO 8601 time and date customary, chosen for its significance because the anniversary of the Worldwide Bureau of Weights and Measures’ creation.
This quirk in date illustration has resulted in some Social Safety candidates being assigned a birthdate of Might 20, 1875, when their precise start date is unknown. Consequently, the system seems to have beneficiaries who’re over 149 years outdated. The state of affairs is additional difficult by many years of labor by quite a few programmers and information entry clerks, resulting in inconsistencies and errors within the system.
Regardless of these errors, the SSA has carried out measures to stop fraudulent claims. When a person passes away, funeral properties are required to file a Assertion of Demise (Type SSA-721).
Moreover, the SSA has been proactively monitoring extraordinarily outdated residents for years. A 2023 research revealed that whereas 18.9 million Social Safety quantity holders have been listed as being born in 1920 or earlier and not using a recorded loss of life date, solely 44,000 have been truly receiving advantages. Moreover, since 2015, the SSA has used automated programs that block funds to anybody over 115 years outdated.
The Social Safety Administration is hardly the one authorities company utilizing a decades-old programming language. Many vital programs, together with these within the Division of Training, Division of Well being and Human Providers, and the Inside Income Service, nonetheless depend on COBOL and different legacy software program.
The IRS, as an illustration, makes use of roughly 160 COBOL functions, together with the Particular person Grasp File (IMF) system, which dates again to the early Sixties.
As well as, 45 states and the District of Columbia proceed to run COBOL programs. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the restrictions of those programs when many unemployment profit packages, constructed on COBOL, struggled to deal with the sudden surge in claims.
Regardless of its age, COBOL stays a strong and environment friendly language for processing giant volumes of enterprise information. It excels in information manipulation, batch processing, and sustaining information accuracy and reliability – which is why COBOL remains to be in style inside sure sectors similar to banking and insurance coverage.
The problem lies not in COBOL’s capabilities however within the lack of funding to replace and preserve authorities legacy code. Whereas some organizations, just like the UK Division for Work and Pensions and the New York Instances, have efficiently migrated away from mainframe COBOL, the duty of modernizing authorities programs stays daunting. Estimates recommend that between 220 billion and 800 billion traces of COBOL code are nonetheless in use right now.
