The U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) says it corrected nearly 15% of active Social Security numbers since the start of the Trump administration, but it has not disclosed whether individual payments or eligibility changed.
SSA said the corrected share spans a system covering about 330 million U.S. citizens and nearly 390 million total records, but it did not give a count of active numbers corrected. The agency said no earlier cleanup in its 91-year history had been as comprehensive.
The work included adding death dates to 17 million records using SSA systems and information from the Department of State. For about 25 million records with missing citizenship details, the agency used the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) service. As of Oct. 20, another 8.5 million records with inaccurate citizenship status remained under correction. EconoTimes previously covered the addition of death dates to 17 million records.
SSA said accurate records help federal and state agencies verify identities, prevent improper payments and administer benefits. Commissioner Frank J. Bisignano said the records “prevent fraud across federal programs.” The agency also said it introduced controls to reduce manual data-entry errors. It did not quantify savings or report how many recipients or payment errors were affected by the cleanup.
An Oct. 23 SSA performance release described the database cleanup as complete but did not mention the 8.5 million records. It did not say whether those records were included in the completed work.
A July 2023 audit by the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that records for 18.9 million people born in 1920 or earlier lacked death information in the Numident file. SSA records indicated most were deceased. The audit count covered records missing death information, not people receiving benefits, and the latest announcement did not explain whether those records overlap with the new updates.
A separate OIG review estimated $71.8 billion in improper payments, mostly overpayments, from fiscal years 2015 through 2022. That was 0.84% of nearly $8.6 trillion in benefits. The report said SSA attributed improper payments to beneficiaries’ failure to report necessary information or the agency’s failure to update records on time; it did not link the estimate to the current cleanup.
