121–130 of 162 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be equally fair, "Crapita" (as private eye calls them) is an incompetent joke that scores government contracts through corruption and then pays the bare minimum (below minimum wage in one case) to the providers of its services. There are lots of examples like the one a above.
> as private eye calls them ...and their customers... suppliers... partners... employees...
> 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. 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 decoup…
> letters make no mention of a deadline or the fact that their payments will cease if they do not respond within 28 days. A spokesperson said this was “to avoid causing upset” This is the most stereotypically British thing I’ve heard this year
It's also a blatant lie, the system is broken and the government allows social services to be so bad because it wants to spend as little money on them as possible.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think had relatives in Poland in the 1980s who were collecting social security for a dead person. 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 d…
SSNs are no longer distributed in that fashion. They are randomly assigned since 2011. But they also weren't sequential. They were divided up by regions and doled out to more local areas.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about a public registry of deaths that can notify parties with justified interest (pension providers, maybe insurances and banks) about such events? That should work for domestic cases at least. Tracking deaths for people living abroad in their retirement is more tricky I admit. 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…
That assumes all deaths are logged. There are strong financial incentives for relatives to hide a death from the government if it means getting a check every month
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.
Every year my grand parents have to take a photo of themselves holding a recent newspaper with date clearly visible to whoever is managing their pension. 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 degenera…
Is it so terrible to do a very simple procedure once a year to avoid fraud?
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.
> ... 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. This is a bug in their system. Rather than fixing it, they prefer repeatedly and unashamedly asking old people whether they are dead.
To be fair, there have been several stories (normally "world's oldest person!!!" type) where relatives have been claiming pensions and benefits for sometimes decades after the actual person died. 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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, there have been several stories (normally "world's oldest person!!!" type) where relatives have been claiming pensions and benefits for sometimes decades after the actual person died. 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...
I think had relatives in Poland in the 1980s who were collecting social security for a dead person. 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 d…
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.
> ... 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. This is a bug in their system. Rather than fixing it, they prefer repeatedly and unashamedly asking old people whether they are dead.
Every year my grand parents have to take a photo of themselves holding a recent newspaper with date clearly visible to whoever is managing their pension. 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 degenera…
What about a public registry of deaths that can notify parties with justified interest (pension providers, maybe insurances and banks) about such events? That should work for domestic cases at least. Tracking deaths for people living abroad in their retirement is more tricky I admit. 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…
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.