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A comment on Are DOGE's Claims of Social Security Payments to 150-Year-Olds Way Off Base?.

Re:Are DOGE's Claims of Social Security Payments to 150-Year... by Aloisius on Saturday February 15, 2025 @06:27PM (#43063518)
The 1875 thing seems... unlikely. While it is possible that the SSA decided to create an epoch of 1875, I don't believe COBOL itself has such an epoch.

Moreover, the SSA's actual Numerical Identification (NUMIDENT) files, the master records for applications/deaths/claims, appears to stored dates in text as either YYYYMMDD or MMDDYYYY strings according to their archived versions.

https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/207202/

I think it's more likely that there are missing death records for some entries (which isn't really a problem unless there are active claims), data entry error, someone didn't get the most recent NUMIDENT iteration (the records are essentially append-only) or did something silly like tried to treat social security numbers as unique ids.

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Re:Are DOGE's Claims of Social Security Payments to 150-Year... by SirBill on Sunday February 16, 2025 @08:39PM (#43073950)
Welcome to the only person in this thread that actually knows something real!
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Re:Are DOGE's Claims of Social Security Payments to 150-Year... by kenscole on Monday February 17, 2025 @08:49AM (#43078973)
What you're missing is that the system was created around 1935, and at that time the eligibility age was 60, so it seems possible that the default entry would be 1875, or the initial youngest year of eligibility for the system.
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