Well there's your problem. Crapita, I mean.
And yet it's completely possible:
> After the Guardian queried the process, the DfE said it would make an exception and decouple McGrath’s name from the deceased’s so that she would not be contacted about it again.
Even if that was entirely manual...
This is the most stereotypically British thing I’ve heard this year
The UK is the country that forces its chronically ill and physically incapable into suicide or death by starvation.
These people are "economically unproductive", so the logic of eugenics suggests they should die.
Yup. Thats about the most British way to speak.
After the internet and apps plaged the world, now they have to download an app then tilt node and wink to the camera to prove that they are alive. ("If you cannot use a phone, ask your children")
I have mixed feeling about this, it's hard to say this is not degenerating, and no one's happy with doing this, but seems like there's no better idea that scales.
Maybe such a registry doesn't exist in the UK to begin with? Since it also doesn't have a residence registry.
Edit: my bad, it actually works too well and then they do a bad job at matching records. I should have read TFA first...
In the US, the pervasiveness of social security numbers as id makes the social security death register very useful. Sure, there may be some deaths unreported, and some reported under the wrong SSN for various reasons, but most of the time it works.
I don't think the UK has a similar enumeration of people, and then you've got data problems. Names drift over time. Name and birthdate aren't unique. People may forget their birthdate non-fradulently and use another one; people reporting the death may not have the right birthdate and guess, etc.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/world-oldest...
"They moved abroad."
The problem here is that the outsourced company doesn't want to spend a couple dollars to employ an actual person to either take a call or go check on people.
These kinds of things are supposed to be the duty of government precisely because they are unprofitable.
Try hosting a class for pensioneers where teaching how to send a photo via email is a gigantic achievement.
Seriously how are so many programmers unglued from reality - that old people dont know how to do stuff, even if someone teaches them. And lots have nobody to teach them.
[1] https://docs.api.lev.homeoffice.gov.uk/life-event-verificati...
This is a bug in their system. Rather than fixing it, they prefer repeatedly and unashamedly asking old people whether they are dead.
Just to make it clear. Not to prove I was born for those particular parents. It is born in general.
For newborns, hospitals release a 'statement of facts' that allow you to order the birth certificate. YMMV.
To be fair, it is much harder to verify this automatically if the recipient lives in another country.
It is reasonably easy for the pension provider in the case at hand to tell when someone dies. A bit too easy, some might say.
Well, that's dumb.
As a consultant, I would be willing to provide a simple fix to this problem for a modest fee. I won't say what it is yet, but I am confident it would work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEdge_Advanced_Business_Lan...
Thankfully I have since moved on to greener pastures. Oddest thing about Capita is that they are able to recruit a lot of smart, competent young people, but then put them to work on maintaining the most awful systems.
> the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link
... and there it is. Crapita, the source of all woes, decided to do a just-good-enough job rather than a good job.
Come on. Even DVLA can handle the case where 2 (or more) people have the same first and last name, and middle initial, and date of birth, when issuing driving licences. They don't mix those up.
They sorted it within 5 days though and paid out compensation and sent her a hamper as an apology. Hopefully they fired the moron who kicked off the process too.
At the end of the day this shit happens but this should trigger a full review and pause all destructive outcomes immediately as mitigation. But being Capita I doubt it will happen.
God forbit you make such a grave mistake as reading a number off a piece of paper and typing it into a system incorrectly.
It's almost asif the interaction between the systems is the problem and not the human on the end...
It may even have been some sort of "AI" that happened to recognise a letter incorrectly.
It's quick to call for people tp be fired, not that you would ever make a simple mistake.
In this case their investigation said that the date of birth and last name were matched but the first names were not. This was flagged through by someone who didn’t do their job.
Thats just negligence of duty. I would expect to be minimally fired if I fucked up and hurt someone.
As you say things happens, so who are you going to fire? It mostly is just a bad coincidences that make these things happens, it mostly is not the guy committing the error who is at fault. I do not want to live in a society where you treat the administrative clerks like you imply.
Registering at birth is somewhat trivial outside some edge cases. How do you resign the SSN at death predictably and accurately? Then, do you trust access to this database from 3rd parties? It's turtles all the way down.
Sounds like garbage software
That's just so typical of the newfangled digital bureaucracy: it's far easier to change the workflow than it is to fix the software.
This is just something software seems to do. There's a mature and fully-fledged industry in modifying entire workflows to fit software which is implicitly viewed as something that simply is the way it is.
Jira and SAP are some obvious big ones, almost with their own priesthoods, but at all levels, "capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say".
And let's not forget that the entire capital-C Content industry is completely subservient to the vagaries of "The Algorithms" that are not just considered ineffable by the supplicants, but were in fact specifically designed to be that way.
Unfortunately the reality is that technology uses us and makes us do things we normally would consider stupid.
Too many times someone introduces technology to dilute responsibility for me to believe that such outcomes are typically unintentional. Technology totally does what people intend it to do, except the average person is on the receiving side of the whip.
Whether the number of those stories and the amount of money involved is worth the hassle to the people not defrauding governments is left as an exercise to the reader...
The U.S. has a database of social security numbers of the deceased which is quite interesting for a few reasons. It is closely guarded because social security numbers are assigned sequentially by geographic region so if you know someone’s SSN you can get their date of birth or vice versa.
If you manage to get in that database you are really in trouble because every financial institution has a copy of that list and there is no procedure to get you off. It is quite literally a “financial death sentence.”
if you know
I worked for a company who was acquired by them and, well, as you said, if you know, you know.
Mortifying
The Post Office Scandal has a similar theme.
Once the person has provided proof once it is the DfE's problem to keep track of that and there is no obligation to keep providing it.
At some point, to keep asking to prove something 'or else' may be construed as harassment in addition to being idiotic.
> Handling all the edge cases would make such a simple system immediately complex.
Why would they consider this to be a problem? They defunded the courts, especially for cases like this. And even if convicted, it won't affect anyone personally. Except of course through promotion if they can make it happen as often as possible.
The USA, also, except here it's often done in tents on the street with fentanyl or deaths of despair elsewhere.
> forces its chronically ill and physically incapable into suicide
How is the UK different from anywhere else in this regard?
It's a system contracted out from UKGOV being administered on behalf of UKGOV. If government oversight worked, it would have worked already, surely?
Misaligned interests don’t create market failures. Usually imperfect information or costs/benefits borne by third parties do.
For example, when the automobile breakthrough happened, manufacturers quickly converged to an "average" design that was cheap to manufacture in large numbers, captured the main strengths of the technology, and happened to suit the average small city, rural or suburban lifestyle where most of the potential customers lived.
Now, this machine was not suitable for a small mountain village. Nor was it suitable for dense urban environments. You could design automobiles specifically for those markets - for example, a much more compact closed two seater, that would save fuel, road and parking space. But you couldn't produce it at a scale that could make it profitable against the dominant design, and the clients would face difficulty, risk and even ridicule when using the dominant "big car" infrastructure.
So what we got instead was a redesign of the city to suit the dominant technology variant, with what we can confidently say today were disastrous results. Just like your Jira consultants, starting from the 60s an entire cottage industry appeared advising cities on how to correctly plan road infrastructure of sufficient "capacity", how to set minimum parking requirements, etc.
If you happen to fall right on the average case of a technology, you gain almost magical benefits and substantial competitive advantages. So your competitors will try to emulate your success even if they don't fit the same pattern. If the interoperability and scale effects are strong, and customization is difficult, we should expect a similar pattern to emerge. And with software, you have both insane scale effects (every copy sold after the first costs zero dollars to make), and strong lock-in effects (file formats and protocols, inherent complexity which leads to a limited talent pool - both your employees and suppliers aren't willing to waste time and effort into a custom technological dead-end for which you are the only potential client etc.).
The media do print occasional Capitalist Gothic stories of people who kept a corpse in their house. But that's incredibly rare and - for obvious reasons - a high price to pay for a monthly cheque.
The government loves spending money on themselves.
So the government thinks it's perfectly reasonable to have 50 FTE spend 5 years on preventing a single false claim. Ideally through the commisioner's brother's company, not directly. This is a necessity!
* the contract with the software vendor is free of the kind of fuckery you mentioned
* the product it has signed off on at the end of the processes is fit for purpose.
Lawyers and programmers are responsible for crafting contracts and software. The government is accountable for the end result.
I am sure that adversaries could exploit the system. But again, that is a non-issue.
in other words, you assume... don't forget culture and upbringing is one hell of a drug.
perhaps they are fully aware, and the minimal amount of abuse is the price they're willing to pay to avoid "discrepancies" like the one from the article.
How much do you think live selfies where you have to wink cost? How much effort do you think that is for people? People who have to "ask their children" for help*? Maybe 1% of the cost of the program? if fraud is already less than 1% or even near it. seems like a great deal to me.
*: if you're the kind of person that believes "ask your children for help", so you can prove to us you're not guilty, is reasonable. You're what's wrong with the world, please resign.*
while social responsibility is one of the main reasons why this does not happen there are several: we have a central people registry of all people eligible to pension. so if a dead person is registered at a hospital, it automatically propagates to all systems (without the issues mentioned in the article).
the amount of registration and control happening to Danish people (with their consent) is inconceivable to the US mentality.
your can not probate an estate without registering a person as deceased.
But I am actually curious on how people steal deceased people's pensions? what happens when it is realized that the person is dead? (eg. by turning 180 years old).
in Denmark all pensions would have been paid out to the pensioners bank account. if somebody withdraw or transferred from that account, they would be caught an prosecuted.
because of this, I guess most people doing this would get caught.
Please be sure to fire them should they mistake one word when reading hundreds of documents a day, they have hereby agreed this is valid cause.
Robert Michael Smith - 12/10/1954
Gerard George Smith - 12/10/1954
The human is guaranteed to make a mistake, just as you are.
God forbid your mistake is only the serious matter of embarrassing an elderly person and needing to have your company apologize and make restitution and not putting software on an aircraft that causes it to fly nose first into the ground killing everyone on board.
Would you like me to draw a picture of how the person shouldn't be fired, the entire system should change?
...and their customers... suppliers... partners... employees...
What does that even mean "annoy the "false positives"" in this case? You mean just leave them dead?
This has been false for decades. (early '90s, I think?)
Edit: https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomizationfaqs.html seems to say that the change was only implemented in 2011, which would mean that even more of the population is unaffected.
Note that enumeration at birth is a recent policy change. Before enumeration at birth, people would not get assigned a number until they (or their parents) asked for one. So while there is a sequential numbering (before that changed) and its tied to geography, the sequence and geography is connected to time and place of assignment, not time and place of birth.
For example, my parents got SSNs for me and my siblings all at once, sometime in the 80s, I beleive as it became required to claim dependents on tax returns. I don't think our SSNs are sequential, but they're close; however my siblings and I have different birth years and could have been born in different states than where we were enumerated.
SSNs aren’t secure credentials without validation, period.
Even in the present UK case, the actual problem was the incompetent way how the "false positive" was resolved, not the fact that it occurred in the first place
Is it the best solution? Likely not. But the problem is real and does demand a solution of some form.
From the original article: "According to the Department for Education (DfE), which oversees Teachers’ Pensions, death register entries may be matched to scheme members even if personal details differ. The DfE told the Guardian that once a possible match has been identified, the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link."
The problem is with the approach in attempting to reduce fraud.
Once a false positive from an incomplete match from the death register is proven false - when the pension recipient tells you they are still alive - you don't need to check up on that same incomplete match every 12 months, because you already know it's false.
Demanding "a solution of some form" completely misunderstands the problem and is the same approach that gave us the Post Office scandal.
I don't follow? This is just a data quality problem. Should it be fixed? Obviously. But everyone deals with bad data. You can't fix that, you just optimize around it.
The Post Office scandal was emphatically NOT about a data quality problem. It was that they were criminally prosecuting people to cover up their data quality problem. Again, everyone has bad data.
I thought that was clear enough in context. But: "Anti-Money Laundering" and "Know your Customer". They come up a lot in discussions here. Also, FWIW: if you're unclear about what someone meant, calling them stupid is a really terrible way to educate yourself.
This woman had to confirm three times in one month, and then still had her pension stop.
For most of human existence, you would already know if Bob or Jane was dead, since you’d have gone to their funeral or knew someone who had.
The problem with this is simply that it’s not absolutely free, and the people promising savings through outsourcing need it to be free to make their promises happen. Cutting budgets everywhere removes the slack you need to deal with things like this.
The possibility of impersonation isn't limited to pension pay-outs but many other things as well. A once-per-year on-site visit would work and would just be a cost-of-business item, and that cost could be lowered substantially by collaborating with other entities who take an interest in such information (banks, governments etc).
The system, administered by C[r]apita, does not log a disproved link... so we get:
DfE: "Hello, are you dead or is our wrong data match from last time still wrong?"
The repeated asking of the same question is them covering up a data quality problem!
Isn't this really a process problem (i.e. a missed requirement), so that after the first instance of a queried match (for whatever reason), the unrelated death record (which will have some kind of unique document identifier or can have one derived from the information on it and date of issue) can be excluded from being matched against the subject user? (As realistically you could have 2 people with same name and DOB, it seems like the issue here is not data quality.)
It sounds like nobody created a requirement in the design stage for the ability to say "I've checked this, it's not the same person, don't flag this same death entry again". That's maybe not something envisaged at requirements time, but the need for it now becomes apparent.
Pretty much the same for all the work UKGOV does to try and combat "fraud", sadly - they always end up spending multiples of the amount they'd save[1]
[1] whilst at the same time enabling fraud of their own like the fast-track PPE contracts, etc.
But that doesn't apply here because the reason KYC/AML is so ineffective -- literally 99.9% ineffective -- is that it's so easy to transfer value in some other way. And in turn to claim that even if you're using a traditional bank.
Money laundering is fundamentally very simple. They open a business that could plausibly generate that amount of profit and then claim the money was the proceeds of that business instead of the illegal one. The bank has no better way to know this is happening than the government, and the only people who do are in on it. So the rules are totally ineffective and because they're totally ineffective, they don't provide a deterrent.
But it's even worse than that. Most government waste is actually somebody's profit or salary, so then they lobby to keep it, but if it's a lot of waste then competing sociopaths lobby to cut it so they can get the tax money, which provides at least some financial pressure to limit the excesses of any given program.
The primary cost of AML/KYC rules isn't tax dollars. They fall on the general public through invasion of privacy, bureaucratic overhead, transaction costs and impaired competition between financial institutions. The general public is a diffuse group without organized lobbyists and without a thorough understanding of how much this is costing them. It also falls disproportionately on people who are already disadvantaged and have even less political influence than average. So there is no one supplying strong political pressure to get rid of it despite the high costs and near-zero effectiveness -- it's basically down to the people who have figured out how stupid this is to make it go away on their behalf.
[1] https://hansondoremus.com/2014-4-28-there-are-four-kinds-of-...
And where there is a financial incentive for recipients to hide this fact?
That’s about as (actually) knowable as how many folks in LA are drug dealers.
We know some are, clearly, since they’ve been caught. But that is not going to be even close to correct in real terms, because they are of course going to work very hard to not get caught.
https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/fact-sheet-how-much-wast...
States “ According to the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General, in 2013 just over 1,500 deceased individuals in all age ranges were still receiving benefits. They account for only $15 million in improper benefit payments.”
And “According to the Social Security Administration, all improper payments, including payments to the deceased and the very old, are estimated at about $3 billion per year.”
That is in the US. And the SSA is really aggressive in trying to track down these issues. Most other pensions don’t have their resources or the type of political pressure they get.
I’ve personally overheard enough discussions among old folks to know that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg though, anymore than arresting Bob for possessing coke is ‘stopping drug trafficking’.
Frustrating, but I’m sure we’ve all been there in some form as software engineers.
The article is attempting to publicly shame them enough that they fix it, which might work. Most organizations are allergic to bad press.
[0] https://slate.com/business/2012/04/the-four-types-of-economi...