Well there's your problem. Crapita, I mean.
And yet it's completely possible:
> After the Guardian queried the process, the DfE said it would make an exception and decouple McGrath’s name from the deceased’s so that she would not be contacted about it again.
Even if that was entirely manual...
This is the most stereotypically British thing I’ve heard this year
The UK is the country that forces its chronically ill and physically incapable into suicide or death by starvation.
These people are "economically unproductive", so the logic of eugenics suggests they should die.
Yup. Thats about the most British way to speak.
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.
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...
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.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/world-oldest...
"They moved abroad."
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.
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.
[1] https://docs.api.lev.homeoffice.gov.uk/life-event-verificati...
This is a bug in their system. Rather than fixing it, they prefer repeatedly and unashamedly asking old people whether they are dead.
Whether the number of those stories and the amount of money involved is worth the hassle to the people not defrauding governments is left as an exercise to the reader...
The U.S. has a database of social security numbers of the deceased which is quite interesting for a few reasons. It is closely guarded because social security numbers are assigned sequentially by geographic region so if you know someone’s SSN you can get their date of birth or vice versa.
If you manage to get in that database you are really in trouble because every financial institution has a copy of that list and there is no procedure to get you off. It is quite literally a “financial death sentence.”
if you know
I worked for a company who was acquired by them and, well, as you said, if you know, you know.
Mortifying
Just to make it clear. Not to prove I was born for those particular parents. It is born in general.
For newborns, hospitals release a 'statement of facts' that allow you to order the birth certificate. YMMV.
To be fair, it is much harder to verify this automatically if the recipient lives in another country.
It is reasonably easy for the pension provider in the case at hand to tell when someone dies. A bit too easy, some might say.
Well, that's dumb.
As a consultant, I would be willing to provide a simple fix to this problem for a modest fee. I won't say what it is yet, but I am confident it would work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEdge_Advanced_Business_Lan...
Thankfully I have since moved on to greener pastures. Oddest thing about Capita is that they are able to recruit a lot of smart, competent young people, but then put them to work on maintaining the most awful systems.
> the beneficiary may be asked to confirm that they are not the same deceased stranger every 12 months since the system, administered by Capita, does not log a disproved link
... and there it is. Crapita, the source of all woes, decided to do a just-good-enough job rather than a good job.
Come on. Even DVLA can handle the case where 2 (or more) people have the same first and last name, and middle initial, and date of birth, when issuing driving licences. They don't mix those up.
They sorted it within 5 days though and paid out compensation and sent her a hamper as an apology. Hopefully they fired the moron who kicked off the process too.
At the end of the day this shit happens but this should trigger a full review and pause all destructive outcomes immediately as mitigation. But being Capita I doubt it will happen.
God forbit you make such a grave mistake as reading a number off a piece of paper and typing it into a system incorrectly.
It's almost asif the interaction between the systems is the problem and not the human on the end...
It may even have been some sort of "AI" that happened to recognise a letter incorrectly.
It's quick to call for people tp be fired, not that you would ever make a simple mistake.
In this case their investigation said that the date of birth and last name were matched but the first names were not. This was flagged through by someone who didn’t do their job.
Thats just negligence of duty. I would expect to be minimally fired if I fucked up and hurt someone.
As you say things happens, so who are you going to fire? It mostly is just a bad coincidences that make these things happens, it mostly is not the guy committing the error who is at fault. I do not want to live in a society where you treat the administrative clerks like you imply.
Registering at birth is somewhat trivial outside some edge cases. How do you resign the SSN at death predictably and accurately? Then, do you trust access to this database from 3rd parties? It's turtles all the way down.
Sounds like garbage software
That's just so typical of the newfangled digital bureaucracy: it's far easier to change the workflow than it is to fix the software.
This is just something software seems to do. There's a mature and fully-fledged industry in modifying entire workflows to fit software which is implicitly viewed as something that simply is the way it is.
Jira and SAP are some obvious big ones, almost with their own priesthoods, but at all levels, "capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say".
And let's not forget that the entire capital-C Content industry is completely subservient to the vagaries of "The Algorithms" that are not just considered ineffable by the supplicants, but were in fact specifically designed to be that way.
The Post Office Scandal has a similar theme.
Once the person has provided proof once it is the DfE's problem to keep track of that and there is no obligation to keep providing it.
At some point, to keep asking to prove something 'or else' may be construed as harassment in addition to being idiotic.
Unfortunately the reality is that technology uses us and makes us do things we normally would consider stupid.
Too many times someone introduces technology to dilute responsibility for me to believe that such outcomes are typically unintentional. Technology totally does what people intend it to do, except the average person is on the receiving side of the whip.
