[methou]

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 degenerating, and no one's happy with doing this, but seems like there's no better idea that scales.

[samus]

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 works too well and then they do a bad job at matching records. I should have read TFA first...

[mucle6]

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

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's quite hard to hide a death in the UK. In hospital all deaths are certified, outside of hospital you have the interesting problem of how to deal with the corpse. And in addition to the death register there are also tax filings (including Council Tax, which is a hefty sum and paid monthly), utilities, and other services that require ID.

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.

[candiodari]

Governments hate spending money on people.

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!

[lostmsu]

What are the obvious reasons? it's not like you have to actually keep the body in your apartment.

[toast0]

The usefulness of a death register depends on how well people are identified.

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.

[creer]

And "most of the time" is not a problem?

[samus]

Is it? And even if it was, is it worth the expense to track them and annoy the "false positives"?

[creer]

What? The parent seems to argue that it's good enough that "most of the time" it's the correct SSN that's declared dead. No big deal that occasionally the wrong SSN is blamed. How can that be good enough? The point of all these systems is that they can go wrong. And since we are dealing with people who, you know, have other things to do than fixing other people's mistakes, then these systems must make it easy to correct the problems. And should minimize the consequences. And probably compensate for them.

What does that even mean "annoy the "false positives"" in this case? You mean just leave them dead?

[samus]

With "false positives" I mean people mistakenly identified as deceased. Anyways, since there is an SSN, such problems happen less often to begin with. And once it is resolved, then it should stay resolved as the record is associated with the SSN.

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

[anotherhue]

The death itself may be hidden for a long time.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/world-oldest...

[madsbuch]

It is fun that this is even a problem in some parts of the world. In Denmark we absolutely know when people are dead and pension payments to deceased people is a non-issue.

[kthejoker2]

How do you "absolutely" know? It seems trivial to hide a death for a long period of time without a potentially extensive investigation.

"They moved abroad."

[madsbuch]

Well, first and most importantly: Denmark is a high trust society.

I am sure that adversaries could exploit the system. But again, that is a non-issue.

[pb7]

In other words, it happens, and you are none the wiser. There will be people that exploit the system in any society -- Danes are not special.

[grayhatter]

> In other words, it happens, and you are none the wiser.

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.*

[madsbuch]

My main point was thst it is a non issue.

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.

[derivative7]

Is it so terrible to do a very simple procedure once a year to avoid fraud?

[bsder]

Um, yes? When did we become such a shitty society that we can't employ a couple people in the government to go check on elderly pensioners once every 5 years or so?

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.

[withinboredom]

There's still a million ways it can fail. The person can be on vacation, the address could be a P.O. Box, the person could be in a hospital, their phone could be dead, etc. Handling all the edge cases would make such a simple system immediately complex.

[dotancohen]

  > Handling all the edge cases would make such a simple system immediately complex.

That's the difference between a Proof of Concept and a production system. I'm hard pressed to think of anything I've ever developed that did not have this property.

[rvba]

It's sad that you dont realize that many old people dont know how to make the most basic stuff on smartphones or computers. And dont have someone to help them.

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.

[Almondsetat]

what happens if they become incapacitated?

[candiodari]

Then the government pays less by violating the law.

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.

[crote]

Is it so terrible to just have the government keep track of its citizens properly, so that there is a single source of truth one can actually rely on?

[creer]

The problem is not the single source. The problem is that this single source is incompetent and refuses to properly provide for mistakes.

[Marazan]

What simple procedures are you doing every year to reduce fraud?

[hgomersall]

It's really simple. You just require that the death certificate is used to close down a pension[1]. Sure people can continue to fraudulently claim a pension but at some point it's unsustainable and they'd be forced to fess up and they will be suitably prosecuted.

[1] https://docs.api.lev.homeoffice.gov.uk/life-event-verificati...

[paganel]

This is so degrading, I hate it with a passion that we've come to this.