by Martin Armstrong at Armstrong Economics
The two certainties in life are death and taxes. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) recently discovered that the living are paying taxes to the dead. In fact, the agency recently eliminated a staggering 12.3 million Social Security recipients who would be over 120 years old if they were still alive today.
In March 2015, authorities were alerted that the Social Security database had not been updated for 6.5 million Americans over the age of 112. There were, in fact, only 35 Americans at or over the age of 112 in 2015. The Social Security Administration’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) believed that some Social Security numbers (SSNs) were being illegally used to open bank accounts, apply for jobs, and report wages. Over 4,000 E-Verify employment checks were sent out to people allegedly over the age of 112, and tens of thousands of false wage reports were used with these SSNs.
Ten years ago, when the matter made headlines, the Social Security Administration claimed it would be too costly to update its electronic database to create a death master file. The SSA would have needed to manually match death reports against current Social Security benefit recipients and input findings in an electronic file called Numident.
The Inspector General (IG) found that from 2008 to 2012, not a single death was recorded on the Numident. “SSA did not establish controls to annotate death information onto the Numident record of number holders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies and were likely deceased,” the IG stated in its report.
This has been a massive waste of funds. In one example…
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