GARNET RIDGE, Ind. — The Social Security Administration said Tuesday that it had corrected nearly 15 percent of the records in its Social Security number database, which holds nearly 390 million in total. The agency described the work as the biggest cleanup in its 91-year history.
The agency said the work included adding missing death dates to records and updating other fields.
Wayne Dorsey, 61, who manages Dorsey Hardware in Garnet Ridge, Ind., said he had read the announcement twice and found it satisfactory. “When somebody tells me they saved money, I want the receipt,” Dorsey said. “When the government tells me it fixed 390 million of something, I don’t need a receipt. The government is the receipt.”
Dorsey said he had asked the agency to confirm his own record. He received a letter stating that his record had been corrected. The letter was dated Oct. 20, 2026, and the postmark on the envelope read Oct. 14, 2019. Dorsey said the discrepancy was a clerical matter and that the agency had clearly been correcting things for a long time. He said he has not opened a second envelope since.
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, said that checking the cleanup would require a second cleanup to verify the first. “A verification at this scale, with one audit per decade, would finish around 2191,” Teller said. “Further study is needed.” The Center has applied for the funding for that study.
In August, the Government Accountability Office reviewed the Department of Government Efficiency’s public “wall of receipts,” a list of savings the department said it had produced by terminating federal contracts. Of roughly $61 billion in claimed contract savings, the GAO said, nearly $35 billion came from contracts that were not terminated or whose savings could not be corroborated.
Asked about the wall, Dorsey said it was a different department with a different approach. “They put the receipts on a wall where everybody could see them,” Dorsey said. “This is a cleanup. Nobody has to see it. That’s the difference between a wall and a cleanup.”
Dorsey said he planned to hang the agency’s announcement beside a photocopy of the GAO’s findings in the front window of the store. He said the two would be easy to compare, and that he did not expect to need to check either one.