Is it the best solution? Likely not. But the problem is real and does demand a solution of some form.
From the original article: "According to the Department for Education (DfE), which oversees Teachers’ Pensions, death register entries may be matched to scheme members even if personal details differ. The DfE told the Guardian that once a possible match has been identified, 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."
The problem is with the approach in attempting to reduce fraud.
Once a false positive from an incomplete match from the death register is proven false - when the pension recipient tells you they are still alive - you don't need to check up on that same incomplete match every 12 months, because you already know it's false.
Demanding "a solution of some form" completely misunderstands the problem and is the same approach that gave us the Post Office scandal.
I don't follow? This is just a data quality problem. Should it be fixed? Obviously. But everyone deals with bad data. You can't fix that, you just optimize around it.
The Post Office scandal was emphatically NOT about a data quality problem. It was that they were criminally prosecuting people to cover up their data quality problem. Again, everyone has bad data.
The system, administered by C[r]apita, does not log a disproved link... so we get:
DfE: "Hello, are you dead or is our wrong data match from last time still wrong?"
The repeated asking of the same question is them covering up a data quality problem!
Isn't this really a process problem (i.e. a missed requirement), so that after the first instance of a queried match (for whatever reason), the unrelated death record (which will have some kind of unique document identifier or can have one derived from the information on it and date of issue) can be excluded from being matched against the subject user? (As realistically you could have 2 people with same name and DOB, it seems like the issue here is not data quality.)
It sounds like nobody created a requirement in the design stage for the ability to say "I've checked this, it's not the same person, don't flag this same death entry again". That's maybe not something envisaged at requirements time, but the need for it now becomes apparent.
Pretty much the same for all the work UKGOV does to try and combat "fraud", sadly - they always end up spending multiples of the amount they'd save[1]
[1] whilst at the same time enabling fraud of their own like the fast-track PPE contracts, etc.
But that doesn't apply here because the reason KYC/AML is so ineffective -- literally 99.9% ineffective -- is that it's so easy to transfer value in some other way. And in turn to claim that even if you're using a traditional bank.
Money laundering is fundamentally very simple. They open a business that could plausibly generate that amount of profit and then claim the money was the proceeds of that business instead of the illegal one. The bank has no better way to know this is happening than the government, and the only people who do are in on it. So the rules are totally ineffective and because they're totally ineffective, they don't provide a deterrent.
But it's even worse than that. Most government waste is actually somebody's profit or salary, so then they lobby to keep it, but if it's a lot of waste then competing sociopaths lobby to cut it so they can get the tax money, which provides at least some financial pressure to limit the excesses of any given program.
The primary cost of AML/KYC rules isn't tax dollars. They fall on the general public through invasion of privacy, bureaucratic overhead, transaction costs and impaired competition between financial institutions. The general public is a diffuse group without organized lobbyists and without a thorough understanding of how much this is costing them. It also falls disproportionately on people who are already disadvantaged and have even less political influence than average. So there is no one supplying strong political pressure to get rid of it despite the high costs and near-zero effectiveness -- it's basically down to the people who have figured out how stupid this is to make it go away on their behalf.
I thought that was clear enough in context. But: "Anti-Money Laundering" and "Know your Customer". They come up a lot in discussions here. Also, FWIW: if you're unclear about what someone meant, calling them stupid is a really terrible way to educate yourself.
This woman had to confirm three times in one month, and then still had her pension stop.
