I haven’t been following this outside of Holly’s essay here, but one point of fraud she doesn’t bring up is using these old numbers as currently active. That is, there are probably checks in place to keep checks from going out, but I wonder how many of these “not dead yet” numbers are being used by those who don’t have a number or do t want to use their own to engage in identity fraud. I suspect that the Social Security admin isn’t too worried if people are paying in even if they should be dead, but lots of subsystems use valid social security numbers as checks on identity.