My mother-in-law is dead. She told me so. She said that according to the Social Security Administration she is no more. She ceased to be. She expired and went to meet her maker. A stiff. Bereft of life, she rests in peace. Except that she quite obviously doesn’t. In fact, she’s more than a little annoyed about it.
As far as can be determined, this bizarre state of affairs came about through the Social Security Administration randomly sending her through the Pearly Gates. Not surprisingly, after that things started to go wrong.
Filing taxes turned out to be a problem because dead people aren’t expected to do anything of the sort. So when her accountant attempted to file her tax return electronically, the IRS’s computers refused to accept the transaction.
My guess is that my mother-in-law expired at the hands of an incompetent data entry clerk. According to RootsWeb.com, the date of her demise was in May 2003 but her Social Security payments stopped in September 2004 when someone with exactly the same name died.
It would appear that my mother-in-law’s inaccurate demise isn’t unusual in government circles. In fact, it happens so often that the Social Security Administration has a policy on how to deal with what it calls “Erroneous Death Termination.”
This policy states that anyone who decides he is not dead “must give identifying information to have SSI benefits reinstated unless the termination is due to an obvious administrative error.” Would someone standing in front of you saying “I’m not dead, dammit!” constitute proof of an administrative error? Apparently not to the Social Security Administration.
The policy continues: “When the death termination is due to a false report, the field office (FO) must conduct a face-to-face interview and obtain acceptable identifying (ID) information to reinstate benefits.”
Now I can understand that the Social Security Administration is a very complex system, and a rigorous process for raising the dead is obviously part of the checks and balances needed to deter and prevent fraud. The problem is that for the individual, the end result is that if the government says you are dead it’s your problem to solve.
So my mother-in-law wound up at the local Social Security Administration office with the required documentation and convinced the field office she was very much alive. While the field office had to admit she was still on this mortal coil, the federal government’s computers weren’t so easily convinced. It looks like my mother-in-law’s fight to escape from administrative limbo might take a while.
What we have in the Social Security Administration is a system of staggering complexity that has been engineered to prevent mistakes. The result is that when mistakes are (inevitably) made, the system isn’t willing to admit to its own fallibility. Worse still, there’s no effective human control element – once the system is up and running it becomes self-maintaining (rather reminiscent of Skynet in the “Terminator” movies), and process is everything.
It isn’t just the government that creates nightmarish management systems that swallow their clients; just think of how your problems are (or rather aren’t) handled by telephone companies, banks, mortgage companies . . . the list is endless. Almost all very large companies build systems that remove people from the responsibility of managing the business.
I have a couple of questions for you. First, is this disconnect from your customers happening or has it happened in your company? Second, can you change the model before your company loses its soul and stops dealing with humans and starts managing statistics?
Send your condolences to my mother-in-law at backspin@gibbs.com. And have you read Gearblog this week?
