Millions of "dead" Social Security recipients actually caused by a COBOL coding quirk

TL;DR: Rumors have been circulating about millions of deceased individuals allegedly receiving Social Security checks. However, this sensational claim is far from the truth. The real story is a complex interplay between aging technology, government systems, and misinterpretations by younger IT professionals, particularly those in the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

The rumors began when Elon Musk claimed that a significant number of Americans over the age of 100 were inappropriately receiving benefits. Musk and other DOGE representatives said they had uncovered "unusual occurrences" during their preliminary review of Social Security. Musk went so far as to assert that individuals as old as 150 were listed as benefit recipients. He later expanded on these claims, stating that over 20 million American centenarians were receiving Social Security payments. Musk shared an image on X of what he described as a spreadsheet from a Social Security database to support his argument.

The real culprit, though, is a programming language that has been the backbone of the Social Security Administration for decades.

Developed in the 1950s, COBOL powers critical functions within the SSA, including processing retirement and disability claims. The administration maintains an impressive 60 million lines of COBOL code.

One of COBOL's peculiarities is its lack of a standardized method for handling dates. This limitation has led programmers to devise creative solutions for representing dates in government databases, including the use of placeholder dates for unknown information.

According to Manjeet Rege, a professor of data science and software engineering at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering, May 20, 1875, is a commonly used placeholder date. This date marks the beginning of time according to the ISO 8601 time and date standard, chosen for its significance as the anniversary of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures' creation.

This quirk in date representation has resulted in some Social Security applicants being assigned a birthdate of May 20, 1875, when their actual birth date is unknown. Consequently, the system appears to have beneficiaries who are over 149 years old. The situation is further complicated by decades of work by numerous programmers and data entry clerks, leading to inconsistencies and errors in the system.

Despite these errors, the SSA has implemented measures to prevent fraudulent claims. When an individual passes away, funeral homes are required to file a Statement of Death (Form SSA-721).

Additionally, the SSA has been proactively monitoring extremely old citizens for years. A 2023 study revealed that while 18.9 million Social Security number holders were listed as being born in 1920 or earlier without a recorded death date, only 44,000 were actually receiving benefits. Furthermore, since 2015, the SSA has used automated systems that block payments to anyone over 115 years old.

The Social Security Administration is hardly the only government agency using a decades-old programming language. Many critical systems, including those in the Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, and the Internal Revenue Service, still rely on COBOL and other legacy software.

The IRS, for instance, uses approximately 160 COBOL applications, including the Individual Master File (IMF) system, which dates back to the early 1960s.

In addition, 45 states and the District of Columbia continue to run COBOL systems. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the limitations of these systems when many unemployment benefit programs, built on COBOL, struggled to handle the sudden surge in claims.

Despite its age, COBOL remains a robust and efficient language for processing large volumes of business data. It excels in data manipulation, batch processing, and maintaining data accuracy and reliability – which is why COBOL is still popular within certain sectors such as banking and insurance.

The challenge lies not in COBOL's capabilities but in the lack of funding to update and maintain government legacy code. While some organizations, like the UK Department for Work and Pensions and the New York Times, have successfully migrated away from mainframe COBOL, the task of modernizing government systems remains daunting. Estimates suggest that between 220 billion and 800 billion lines of COBOL code are still in use today.