"In 2020-2021, @SBAgov issued 3,095 loans, including PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) and EIDL (Economic Injury Disaster Loan), for $333M to borrowers over 115 years old who were still marked as alive in the Social Security database. In one case, a 157 years old individual received $36k in loans."
Elon Musk stated somewhere (I think in his most recent interview with Joe Rogan) that he thinks the biggest grift with all those excess social security numbers is in other programs. He said the systems aren't closely linked together, so if a social security number comes through as valid and not dead, that's good enough.
By the way, there are at least 3.4 million "people" in every 10 year age cohort from the 20s to the 140s.
This reminds me of that old joke "a billion here, a billion there, and soon you are talking real money". Of course when that joke first appeared, a billion was a noticeable amount of money even in the US government budget.
Those are the obvious frauds -- people using fraudulent SSNs that belonged to others.
I've been trying to put together numbers on the "not obviously dead people" stuff.... because there's plenty of fraud in that bucket, too.
....and the bullshit "we can't flag fraud" - this is the biggest bullshit around. They could if they had the incentive to - private companies do, and they build all sorts of systems to detect and fight fraud. Even in regulatory systems, you have bounty programs (the SEC gets this - I know of people who collected SEC bounties for reporting fraud). But it seems there is zero incentive here.
Life has been getting in the way of me being able to do podcasts/videos, and completing a bunch of posts in draft... ... maybe I'll have something short on SocSec in light of Elon's post.
DOGE posted this on X this afternoon:
"In 2020-2021, @SBAgov issued 3,095 loans, including PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) and EIDL (Economic Injury Disaster Loan), for $333M to borrowers over 115 years old who were still marked as alive in the Social Security database. In one case, a 157 years old individual received $36k in loans."
Elon Musk stated somewhere (I think in his most recent interview with Joe Rogan) that he thinks the biggest grift with all those excess social security numbers is in other programs. He said the systems aren't closely linked together, so if a social security number comes through as valid and not dead, that's good enough.
By the way, there are at least 3.4 million "people" in every 10 year age cohort from the 20s to the 140s.
This reminds me of that old joke "a billion here, a billion there, and soon you are talking real money". Of course when that joke first appeared, a billion was a noticeable amount of money even in the US government budget.
Those are the obvious frauds -- people using fraudulent SSNs that belonged to others.
I've been trying to put together numbers on the "not obviously dead people" stuff.... because there's plenty of fraud in that bucket, too.
....and the bullshit "we can't flag fraud" - this is the biggest bullshit around. They could if they had the incentive to - private companies do, and they build all sorts of systems to detect and fight fraud. Even in regulatory systems, you have bounty programs (the SEC gets this - I know of people who collected SEC bounties for reporting fraud). But it seems there is zero incentive here.
Life has been getting in the way of me being able to do podcasts/videos, and completing a bunch of posts in draft... ... maybe I'll have something short on SocSec in light of Elon's post.