Discussions about Fraud of Social Security Administration (SSA) by Elon Musk have given rise to criticism of the use of Cobol by the federal government, a software system that critics outdoors outdated.
Musk claimed that the outdated systems of the SSA have led to considerable errors, including records of people over 150 years of age who received government benefits.
Newsweek Contacted Musk via the X -Pers office via e -mail for more information.
Why it matters
The social security system is the newest area of the federal government to which the Ministry of Government Efficiency is aimed. The organization of Musk has already made radical changes to the landscape of Washington, such as the dismantling of USAID.
Musk spoke with reporters in the Oval Office about the dangers of fraud in social security: “We are investigating social security and we have people who are 150 years old. Do you know someone who is 150? I don’t.
“They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. They miss it. They are probably dead, that would be my gamble. Or they should be very famous, one of the two.”
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What to know
Musk claimed that the current SSA system created mistakes in social security that sent money to people who didn’t need it.
The SSA currently uses Cobol, which is the 60-year-old programming language that is still used on a large scale in government databases.
According to reports of Wired, One reason for the supposed 150-year-old people in the social security system is the lack of a date type of Cobol. Because some implementations of SSA databases are lacking as standard or incomplete birth dates as a reference point, often May 20, 1875, this means that records are aging without the correct birth dates that can be displayed far beyond the human lifespan.
Moreover, the SSA has a policy to stop income payments to people at the age of 115. Since September 2015, the agency has automatically stopped payments for every recipient registered as a parent than this threshold.
What is Cobol?
Cobol, developed in the 1950s through a public-private partnership, was designed as an English-like programming language for business applications.
Although most companies in the private sector have left Cobol because of the maintenance costs and the lack of compatibility with modern systems, it remains widely used in the government and regulated industries.
Government agencies rely on cobol-based mainframes for critical financial transactions, including tax payments, social security and medicine. The systems are, if correctly maintained, very reliable, with built -in redundancy and error tolerance. Cobol remains essential in sectors such as finance, telecommunications and healthcare.
What people say
Technology writer Michael Hiles on X, formerly Twitter: “Dear Lord, now everyone is a Cobol programming expert on social media. I am actually a Cobol programmer (Dibol was my first language on a PDP 11/70 -It was Dec’s ITERATION of Cobol).
“The argument of 1875 Epoch is Bulls ***. Cobol does not even have a date type. It is full system specifically for how the developer initially made it – hence the crazy scramble for Y2K -written.”
What happens afterwards
Musk continues his research into the government spending in his capacity as head of the Ministry of Efficiency of the Government.
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