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If COBOL is so problematic, why does the US government still use it?

If you've gotten cash from an ATM, you've interacted with a COBOL-based system. Here's why this old programming language will probably outlive us all.

Some people think tens of millions of dead people are collecting Social Security checks. That's not true. What's really going on is people don't understand its old, underlying technology. 

The saga of 150-year-old Social Security recipients is a tale that intertwines aging technology, government systems, and modern misunderstandings by the youthful Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) IT people. At the heart of this story lies COBOL, a programming language that has been Social Security's backbone for decades.

COBOL code and arcane standards

COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, was developed in the 1950s and has become a critical component of the Social Security Administration's (SSA) IT infrastructure. The SSA maintains over 60 million lines of COBOL code, which powers its core business functions, including processing retirement and disability claims.

One of COBOL's peculiarities is its lack of a standardized way to store and work with dates. This limitation has led to programmers making up ways in government databases to represent dates. This also meant they came up with the use of placeholder dates for unknown information.

According to Manjeet Rege, data science and software engineering professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering, one of the most common placeholder dates is May 20, 1875. Why that date? Because that's the beginning of time according to the ISO 8601 time and date standard. 

Now, you may well ask why the standard makers picked that seemingly arbitrary date? The answer is it's not arbitrary at all, just obscure. It's the anniversary of the International Bureau of Weight and Measures creation date, aka the metric system. 

What that means in practice is that, in at least some cases, if someone applies for Social Security without a birth date, they'd automatically be assigned a birthdate of May 20, 1875, which is how we end up with 149+-year-old senior citizens.

That's not the whole story, though. Thousands of programmers have worked on the Social Security system over the decades, and untold numbers of data entry clerks have posted dates into the system. The result has been, in a word, messy.

For example, a 2011 Social Security Inspector General analysis of data reported that "an abnormally large spike in the number of individuals with a YOB [Year of Birth] value equal to 1900." I have no doubt this resulted from data entry clerks simply picking an easy date for someone who was very old. 

In addition, all Social Security records from before 1950 were originally kept on paper and microfilm and then brought over by hand. That left lots of room for human error. 

None of which gives would-be thieves much room to operate. You see, when you die and are buried or cremated, the funeral home should file a Statement of Death by Funeral Directors (Form SSA-721). There really is a form for everything! 

In addition, years before DOGE existed, the Social Security Administration (SSA) was already checking on extremely old citizens. This 2023 study found that while 18.9 million Social Security number holders were listed as being born in 1920 or earlier and didn't have a death date recorded, only 44,000 were receiving benefits. In short, the records may be filled with errors, but only a comparative handful of accounts are still being paid out.

Finally, since 2015, the SSA has had automated systems in place that automatically block payments to anyone older than 115. In short, there are no vampires out there getting Social Security payments.