In an illustration of what can happen when you use Big Data uncritically, it has emerged that no less than 6.5 million living Americans have reached the ripe old age of 112. Even more amazingly, it appears that just 13 of the super-silver legions are claiming benefits - and tens of thousands of them appear to be holding down jobs at least part-time.Fortunately, the Republic's policies are ideology-driven, not data-driven so it probably doesn't matter.
Were they being taken seriously, the Social Security Administration's records would be shattering assumptions regarding the numbers of supercentenarians alive in the world today.
The fact that US social security records nominally contain more than six million Americans aged 112+ emerged in a recent report from the social security Inspector-General's office. The same records appear to indicate that the oldest American still alive would have been born in 1869, a mere four years after the culmination of the American Civil War.
Only 13 of the 6.5 million are actually claiming Social Security benefits, it seems, but the other numbers have not been formally deleted and thus create an opportunity for fraudsters to give false details when providing their financial information.
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Social Security Administration's Big Data is a Big Mess
I'm shocked, shocked! to find out that the Fed.Gov has lots of lousy data:
146 years old? We need to track this person down so that they can get the recognition that they deserve. Why, they've beaten the standing world record for longest-lived person by 26 years!
ReplyDeleteOf course, to some this will come as a shock.
Me? I'll just suppress the urge to tell them "I told you so!" for a bit longer.
The wheels are coming off of the idea of a competent, benevolent, all-knowing government one VA scandal at a time. Now with the APCA or whatever, it's going to get awfully hard for them to hide their incompetence from the masses. We'll see.
The US Army discovered many years ago that when a retired soldier moved to the philipenes, he became immortal. No matter how old they got, they never died.
ReplyDeleteThat's when the military started issuing new ID cards with fingerprint information encoded. beneficiaries had to prove they were alive to continue getting benefits.