“This is the first time [the] SSA has undertaken an effort of this scale, and I am proud of the work we have done to strengthen the foundation of identity data relied upon throughout government and the economy,” Frank Bisignano, commissioner of the SSA, said in a statement shared with Yahoo News.
The agency reportedly used information from the State Department, as well as its own systems, to add missing dates of death to millions of accounts while strengthening internal controls to prevent potential errors from manual data entry down the road.
The SSA, however, has not revealed whether these corrections will change the payments or eligibility for any recipients. Meanwhile, the accuracy of the agency’s death records has drawn plenty of scrutiny in the past.
SSA says its records are ‘highly accurate’
The SSA is responsible for maintaining the Death Master File (DMF), a database that records the deaths of individuals who had a SSN. But sometimes, it makes mistakes.
According to Catherine E. Sears, senior counsel at Gross McGinley, LLP, the SSA falsely declares around 9,000 people to be deceased every year due to clerical errors. In a 2025 statement, the SSA revealed it receives more than three million death reports every year, adding that its records are “highly accurate.”
“Of these millions of death reports received each year, less than one-third of 1% are erroneously reported deaths that need to be corrected,” the SSA said in its statement. While that’s a small percentage, this error rate still leaves around 10,000 people incorrectly reported as dead, who then have to figure out how to come back to life.
And that’s only counting those who were accidentally declared deceased. More recently, the SSA found itself in hot water following two incidents where living people were intentionally put on the Death Master File as a potential form of government intimidation.
In April 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) put more than 6,000 living immigrants’ names onto the Death Master File. According to one DHS official, the Trump administration was hoping this move would encourage those immigrants who were declared deceased to deport themselves, CNN reported.
In June 2026, a whistleblower who was a former SSA executive said Trump officials were also planning to mark 2.7 million immigrants — including U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead on the Death Master File as part of its crackdown on immigration. The plan, however, was never carried out, the Washington Post reported.
A worker in the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency reportedly told Marketwatch that “either the lives of these individuals would be ruined … and they would be driven to ‘self-deport’” or they would have to go to a local SSA office to correct the error, at which point the DHS could potentially “detain them for deportation.”
