President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has highlighted a long-running problem that the Social Security Administration hasn’t been eager to fix.
Elon Musk, the Tesla boss and billionaire Trump is working with on DOGE projects, called attention the issue in a post about the number of people older than 100 listed on a Social Security database. During a briefing Tuesday, Trump said “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” on Social Security rolls.
“We have a very corrupt country,” the president said. “If you take all of those numbers off, because they’re obviously fraudulent or incompetent, but if you take all of those people off … all of sudden we have a very powerful Social Security.”
The problem is complex and SSA, the independent federal agency responsible Social Security benefits, numbers and cards, hasn’t rushed to fix it.
Social Security’s Acting Commissioner Lee Dudek said Wednesday he’s sure it will get done with help from DOGE.
“The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record,” he said. “These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.”
Dudek added: “I am confident that with DOGE’s help and the commitment of our executive team and workforce, that Social Security will continue to deliver for the American people.”
SSA’s inspector general told agency officials in 2015 to address problems with incomplete or missing death information for people born before 1920, but the agency didn’t fix the problem and said it was too expensive to do so.
In July 2023, the Office of Inspector General reported that “SSA has not established controls to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies.”
While the Census Bureau estimated about 86,000 people living in the U.S. were age 100 or older, SSA’s Numident included about 18.9 million numberholders who were born in 1920 or earlier but had no death information on their Numident record, according to the OIG report. Most of these numberholders are dead and aren’t collecting Social Security checks, but the OIG office said the missing information makes it more difficult for the federal government as a whole to fight fraud.
While they might not be collecting Social Security checks, some of those Social Security numbers are in use.
The SSA OIG office reported that in tax years 2016 through 2020, employers and individuals reported about $8.5 billion in wages, tips and self-employment income using 139,211 SSNs assigned to people age 100 or older. SSA transferred these earnings to the Earnings Suspense File because personally identifiable information provided on the workers’ earnings reports didn’t match information in SSA records.
After the 2015 report, SSA considered multiple options, including adding presumed death information to Numident records. But it didn’t do it. SSA decided not to proceed because the “options would be costly to implement, would be of little benefit to the agency, would largely duplicate information already available to data exchange consumers and would create cost for the states and other data exchange partners,” according to the report.
In a 2016 post on the issue, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said eliminating all Social Security fraud wouldn’t fix structural problems with the benefit programs.
“While reducing fraud is noble goal, the savings are a tiny fraction of all Social Security spending,” it noted. “Ending benefit payments to thousands of beneficiaries would barely move the needle on solvency – there would need to be almost 10 million ineligible 106-year-olds in order to save Social Security solely by ending fraudulent and mistaken payments.”
So how many dead people are getting Social Security checks? Past reports give some indications.
According to a 2013 report by the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General, there were about 1,500 dead people still getting benefits in total, including many younger than 106 and accounting for about $15 million in additional improper benefit payments. That OIG report from 2015 found 6.5 million active Social Security numbers for people over the age of 112. Thirteen of them were used to receive benefits.
“A much bigger fraudulent use of the remaining numbers is to contribute payroll taxes into the system, not to collect benefits from it,” CRFB noted.
