14 DAY TRIAL // An investigative report called Grave Mistakes reveals that the Social Security Administration (SSA) leaks large quantities of information each year because of computer operating errors.
The paper shows that each year thousands of people are falsely declared deceased and even though this might seem amusing, to be declare dead when you're actually alive is a bureaucratic nightmare for those who fall victim to these unfortunate practices.
On the other hand, it seems that those who are really dead, in some cases appear as being alive in the SSA database. For instance, on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center incident occurred, there are only 9,000 deaths declared, when there should have been at least 12,000.
This is not the only issue, because living people are declared dead, their names, dates of birth and Social Security Numbers are made public which turns them into potential victims to identity theft.
The institution blames all the mistakes on “inadvertent keying errors” made by their employees while entering data into the system.