HAVE YOU BEEN THE VICTIM OF THE GOVERNMENT TELLING PEOPLE THAT YOU’RE DEAD?
HAS YOUR NOT-DEATH LED TO CONSEQUENCES SUCH AS LOSS OF BENEFIT PAYMENTS, FAILURE TO GET
A LOAN, AND ALL YOUR FRIENDS CALLING YOU MEAN NICKNAMES, LIKE CORPSE-NEY COX, DEAD CRUZ,
OR SPONGEDEAD SQUARE-PASSED?
IF SO, CALL THE LINK ON YOUR SCREEN RIGHT NOW.
IT WON’T HELP YOU WITH THE DEAD THING, BUT IT CAN GET YOU A THREE-TOPPING PIZZA FOR ONLY
$7.99.
Alright, so, here’s the thing about dying: it means that you’re dead.
But what if, as a dead person, instead of being dead, you weren’t?
Well, that’s basically what thousands of Americans deal with every year.
Let me explain.
So basically, the Social Security Administration has to keep a list of all living Americans,
so that it can pay them their Social Security benefits when they turn 65, or, if you were
born after 1969, never.
But keeping an accurate list of all the people who are alive also necessarily means keeping
a list of all the people who are dead, so the SSA does that too.
It’s called the Death Master File, and if you’re thinking that Deathmaster sounds
like the name of a bad 70’s vampire horror movie, that’s because it is.
The Death Master File, though, is a decidedly non vampiric dataset: and if you’re watching
this video, you’ve got a social security number, and you’re dead, then you’re probably
on it.
I say “probably” because the Death Master File, or DFM is, like my ability to properly
make initialisms, prone to error.
That’s because it’s generally updated through reports and death certificates from
medical examiners and funeral homes that are entered manually.
So, if a funeral home director slips on some dead guy juice and types in the wrong social
security number, the wrong person might be recorded as dead.
Now, there are some safeguards: most of the SSA’s death information comes from states
using a system called EDR––electronic death records––which checks the information
against the Social Security Administration’s NUMIDENT files, so if someone’s made a mistake
an error message pops up saying “hey chief, you biffed it” and it can be fixed.
But EDR isn’t perfect, not all states use EDR, and the SSA also gets death data from
other sources, like written notices from close relatives, all of which means that even with
an error rate of less than one third of 1%, about 7-12,000 Americans get wrongly listed
as dead every year.
Daily, that’s somewhere between one and 8 billion people a day.
So, what are the consequences of being dead when you’re alive?
Well, as the DMF is primarily a tool of the Social Security Administration, the most obvious
issue is that you don’t receive any Social Security payments you may be eligible for,
which of course sucks because money.
But the problem goes much deeper than that, because the DMF isn’t just used by the Social
Security Administration.
They also distribute it to state and federal agencies––and thanks to the Freedom of
Information Act, the Death Master File has been public information since 1980, so it’s
used by a ton of private companies: credit agencies, identity authentication companies,
banks, and others.
And to add incompetence to injury, thanks to states’ rights, the SSA can’t share
state-collected data, which generally uses EDR and is more accurate, with the public;
they can only send them the federally-collected data, which has a lot more errors.
Hooray federalism!
But still, you might think, “What’s the big deal?
Let’s say I apply for a loan, and it comes up that I’m dead.
I can just tell them I’m not dead.
And given that being able to say ‘I’m not dead’ is a pretty clear sign that you
are, in fact, not dead, that ought to clear everything up.”
But it doesn’t.
That’s because banks aren’t worried that you’re a zombie: they’re worried you’re
an identity thief.
You see, identity thieves commonly use the social security numbers of dead people for
their identity thieving, which is actually pretty easy given that, as we’ve been discussing
for the last four minutes, there’s a publicly available database that posts the names and
social security numbers of dead people.
But because of the magic of bureaucracy, there’s about a four to six week period between when
someone’s name shows up in the Death Master File, and when the social security number
is actually discontinued.
So in that four to six weeks, identity thieves can use the still-active social security number
of a no-longer-active dead person to try to collect their benefits, take out a loan in
their name, or do an epic prank on their widow.
All of which means that if you’re an alive person who’s listed as dead, and you apply
for a loan or a lease or an epic prank, people will assume you’ve stolen some dead person’s
identity, and deny your application faster than you can say “You just got widow-ized”
which is the catchphrase of your widow-pranking YouTube channel.
Now, typically, people can get their name removed from the Death Master File pretty
quickly by contacting the Social Security Administration––but even if the SSA removes
you from their copy of the Death Master File, that doesn’t mean you’re automatically
removed from every private business’ copy of the Death Master File.
This can have genuinely devastating impacts: an Alabama woman named Judy Rivers was listed
as dead in 2008, was unable to get a job or housing, and ended up living in her car for
several months, as she tried to explain to credit agencies and identity authenticators
that she wasn’t a deadbeat, she was just dead.
But don’t worry, the Social Security Administration has proposed a way to fix the problem: saying
that it should be somebody else’s problem.
The Social Security Advisory Board published a report in 2019 requesting that responsibility
to collect and provide death data to federal agencies and the public should be shifted
to the Treasury, who already runs a system called Do Not Pay, that consolidates benefits
information.
So rest assured, if you’re wrongly listed as dead, the federal government is hard at
work arguing about whose fault it is.
So, assuming you’re not dead, live in the US, and pay for a cell phone plan, I almost
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It’s kinda a no brainer, but what should really seal the deal is that by going to hai.ting.com
or by clicking the button on screen, you’ll get a $25 credit––enough for a full month
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So, regardless of whether you’re a power data user or a power loser of the money you
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