[wslh]

To be more fair: it is easy to check if they are alive or not. This is not rocket science.

[gruez]

How is it easy? How do you make sure the old person in front of you is really the pensioner and not her 80 year old daughter?

[rad_gruchalski]

And how’s a photo with a newspaper better?

[wslh]

Sorry, but we have not doing this for centuries if not milleniums for trillion of people before us?

[lazide]

We haven’t at this scale, no.

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.

[wslh]

Sorry, I am missing something. Are you saying that the people that are dying every day, in the developed world, is uncounted by a big margin? What is that margin?

[Macha]

Japan estimated 5% in 2006, for one data point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi

[wslh]

Japan is Japan [1]. What is your data point for European and American countries?

[1] https://hansondoremus.com/2014-4-28-there-are-four-kinds-of-...

[gruez]

For most of human history pensions and social security did not exist, so there was little incentive lie.

[jazzyjackson]

bureauracratized welfare and government identification is relatively new

[userbinator]

In these times, it is only easy in-person.

[mvc]

Even in these times, once you've done the work to disprove the alleged link, it should be easy to log that fact.

[smeej]

Even so, a pension system for UK schoolteachers probably does have the bandwidth to get an in-person identity check done.

[m-p-3]

How do you reliably do it at a massive scale? Other than using some kind of biometrics, there's the possibility of impersonation.

[breezeTrowel]

Simple. The article states they use the UK's death registry. The problem is they have no way to flag an erroneous match for longer than 12 months.

[acdha]

“Massive scale” is a distraction because society is even more massive. For example, if you’re talking about school pensions you have a school system with employees and that means you could do things like have someone check ID in person, and perhaps require a non-relative witness if there’s any question. Doctors offices could similarly be enlisted to certify that person X is the patient they’ve been seeing.

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.

[jacquesm]

You'd think if they are able to reliable set up a contribution scheme that works at scale that they could set up a system to ensure they only pay out to individuals that are still alive.

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).

[pjmorris]

They send pension checks out to specific addresses and accounts at exactly the same scale. Does it seem unreasonable to add 'attempt to call the pensioner' into the 'maybe they are deceased' part of the verification protocol?

[otikik]

So is to add an extra field “different deceased person with same name”