[derivative7]

Is it so terrible to do a very simple procedure once a year to avoid fraud?

[bsder]

Um, yes? When did we become such a shitty society that we can't employ a couple people in the government to go check on elderly pensioners once every 5 years or so?

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.

[withinboredom]

There's still a million ways it can fail. The person can be on vacation, the address could be a P.O. Box, the person could be in a hospital, their phone could be dead, etc. Handling all the edge cases would make such a simple system immediately complex.

[dotancohen]

  > Handling all the edge cases would make such a simple system immediately complex.

That's the difference between a Proof of Concept and a production system. I'm hard pressed to think of anything I've ever developed that did not have this property.

[rvba]

It's sad that you dont realize that many old people dont know how to make the most basic stuff on smartphones or computers. And dont have someone to help them.

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.

[Almondsetat]

what happens if they become incapacitated?

[candiodari]

Then the government pays less by violating the law.

Why would they consider this to be a problem? They defunded the courts, especially for cases like this. And even if convicted, it won't affect anyone personally. Except of course through promotion if they can make it happen as often as possible.

[crote]

Is it so terrible to just have the government keep track of its citizens properly, so that there is a single source of truth one can actually rely on?

[creer]

The problem is not the single source. The problem is that this single source is incompetent and refuses to properly provide for mistakes.

[Marazan]

What simple procedures are you doing every year to reduce fraud?