2 weeks Ago
A single mishandled phone call to the Social Security Administration wreaked havoc on my life. What ..
. More I learned in the process can help inform the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency. My father passed away on November 17, 2023.
In the haze of his passing, a well-meaning hospital attendant mentioned that I could notify the Social Security Administration (SSA) of his death myself or let the funeral home handle it. Wanting to feel useful in those first days of grief, I made the call. I had no idea that, in doing so, I was about to experience a bureaucratic nightmare unlike anything I had ever faced.
The SSA representative on the phone was kind and sympathetic. They asked for my father’s Social Security number. “Sure thing.
It’s XXX-XX-XXXX.” Then came the next request: “And, sir, what is your name and Social Security number?” “Is my information really necessary?” “Yes, it’s part of our protocol.” “Okay.
Sachin Jain, YYY-YY-YYYY.” And that was that. Without much fanfare, my father was officially deceased in the eyes of the U.
S. government. A week later, my mother received a letter from one of my 401(k) providers.
It expressed condolences for my passing and informed her that, as my listed beneficiary, she would receive my funds. Then another letter arrived—this one from my credit card company, offering sympathies to my wife. Then another.
And another. As it turned out, when I reported my father’s death, the SSA had mistakenly “killed” me, too. The SSA had added my name to the Master Death File, a list against which financial institutions cross-check records.
One by one, my banks and service providers declared me deceased. To return to the land of the living, I had to start calling each institution that had marked me as dead. “I can assure you, I’m alive.
It’s me.” Most believed me and corrected the error in their systems. I also called the SSA, where a representative—after several hours of time on hold— apologized and assured me I had been “resurrected.
” Annoying as it was, the dark comedy of my inadvertent government-led assassination actually helped distract me from my grief. Then, in April, my accountant called. “We submitted your taxes, but there’s an error when we try to submit your wife’s taxes.
” Then came a letter from the IRS, advising that there was an issue with my tax submission. At first, I didn’t connect this tax issue to my earlier brush with the bureaucratic afterlife. But it turned out the IRS had never received word from the SSA that I had been brought back to life.
Our tax submissions were triggering an error in the system. Maybe being dead wasn’t so bad? And then I remembered that the government had continued to collect taxes from my job, and I was due a meaningful refund. I called the IRS.
They needed notarized documents proving I was alive. “You see, there are a lot of scammers out there,” they explained. Fair enough.
After sending the documents, my accountant resubmitted our tax returns. A few months later, I got a call from my accountant: “I have bad news. You’re still dead.
” Despite the SSA’s assurances, I had never actually been reinstated in their system. I needed help, and fast. This had gone on for nearly a year.
I finally reached out to a senior colleague I knew in the Social Security Administrator’s office. I had resisted calling her earlier—I thought I could sort it out myself. But after months of bureaucratic whack-a-mole (which had become a colossal waste of time), I gave in and asked for help.
My friend sympathized and intervened. A few days later, I was in a Los Angeles SSA office, proving that I was, indeed, alive. And just like that, I was officially resurrected.
A few weeks later, our taxes were successfully filed, and I was once again a taxpaying citizen in good standing. Like almost everyone else, I usually dread paying taxes. But when the transmission went through, I felt, well, alive.
I’m still wondering if I’m listed as dead anywhere I shouldn’t be. I’ll never know for sure, but I have two theories. The first: a simple clerical error.
A sympathetic SSA employee may have accidentally entered my Social Security number in the wrong field. Given high call center turnover rates and training gaps, this isn’t far-fetched. The second—and, I suspect, more likely—is that a bot killed me.
Government agencies increasingly rely on artificial “intelligence” and robotic process automation to streamline operations. It’s possible that an algorithm mistakenly pulled my Social Security number from the call record and added me to the Master Death File. Either way, I was alarmed to learn that my situation wasn’t all that uncommon.
SSA staff told me that people routinely get “inadvertently” killed in government records. Which brings me to the bigger issues of our day. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is hard at work eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse.
There are plenty of arguments about the constitutionality and methods of the DOGE team. I’ll leave those questions to others who can write more authoritatively on them. What I can say is that, having led corporate restructurings myself, companies often fail when they pursue savings at the expense of opportunities to improve their operations.
The real waste isn’t just excess staffing. It’s that federal agencies don’t treat people like customers. Every agency—though they serve overlapping populations—maintains its own separate records and systems.
The IRS. The Social Security Administration. Medicare.
The Transportation Security Administration. The Veterans Administration. There are some interconnections—like the Master Death File—but far fewer than there should be.
Even though in each instance, a person is a client or customer of the federal government’s services. All of the controversy about Elon Musk’s tweets on the dead still drawing on social security notwithstanding, I learned the hard way that a dead person can: Still pay taxes on earned income. Still fly domestically.
Still be readmitted into the U.S. after international travel.
Still access social services. Why? Because these agencies don’t communicate efficiently and operate off of different databases. And when unintentional (really, unforgivable) errors like mine happen? Good luck.
You’re largely on your own to make them right. Years ago, McKinsey & Company advised Fortune 100 clients on a strategy called “customer centricity.” The idea was simple: Companies with multiple customer touch points should unify them into a single interface informed by all interactions.
The belief? Streamlining operations leads to better service. The federal government needs its own version of this approach. Bad restructurings slash costs indiscriminately.
Good restructurings create a vision for better service—simplifying operations in a way that reduces costs while improving outcomes. My resurrected self believes that government restructuring is indeed needed. It just needs a guiding vision of delivering even better service to all Americans at a lower cost.
The future inadvertently murdered among you will thank me..
