[steveBK123]

The point of my story was that, yes, in this poor European country as recently as 1960.. people were regularly registering children weeks late, and the government would only issue birth cert where date=today. Which is why all of my aunts & uncles have a real & official birthdate which don't match.

This was happening in a place & time where there were telephones & buses. It was simply inconvenient to get to the city immediately, so people went when they had the next opportunity, and presented opportunity to "choose a birthdate" by when they appeared.

This is only 1 particular example in 1 place of weirdness of official birth dates.

Imagine areas of the world a little further back when travel would have been by foot or horse. Given that this was happening even in a somewhat developed place & time, all sorts of stuff could be happening elsewhere for random, benign, non-pension-fraud related reasons.

[Retric]

But your example doesn’t fit the pattern of days divisible by 5 so it’s irrelevant.

The 5th of January is equally likely to be on any day of the week including weekends. Simply delaying + office days etc don’t get you that pattern it only shows up if people are filling in arbitrary dates.

Further if people are filling in arbitrarily dates +/- N years or even months that’s going to dramatically increase the number of officially extremely old deaths. Aka far more people die at 100 than 107. So randomly add or subtract a few years and on official paperwork you might lose one person who actually died at 107, but then add 2 people who actually died at 100 but officially died at 107.