There is already a foolproof method that is immune to any abuse of trust by admins; create an alt account.

Yeah. And the fix for that has nothing to do with “de-duping” as a database operation either.

The main components would probably be:

1. Decide on a new scheme (with more digits)
2. Create a mapping from the old scheme to the new scheme. (that’s where existing duplicates would get removed)
3. Let people use both during some transition period, after which the old one isn’t valid any more.
4. Decide when you’re going to stop issuing old SSNs and only issue new ones to people born after some date.

There’s a lot of complication in each of those steps but none of them are particularly dependant on “de-duped” databases.

It’s so basic that documentation is completely unnecessary.

“De-duping” could mean multiple things, depending on what you mean by “duplicate”.

It could mean that the entire row of some table is the same. But that has nothing to do with the kind of fraud he’s talking about. Two people with the same SSN but different names wouldn’t be duplicates by that definition, so “de-duping” wouldn’t remove it.

It can also mean that a certain value shows up more than once (eg just the SSN). But that’s something you often want in database systems. A transaction log of SSN contributions would likely have that SSN repeated hundreds of times. It has nothing to do with fraud, it’s just how you record that the same account has multiple contributions.

A database system as large as the SSA has needs to deal with all kinds of variations in data (misspellings, abbreviations, moves, siblings, common names, etc). Something as simplistic as “no dupes anywhere” would break immediately.

Nobody builds cars under slave like conditions. It’s just not possible. Modern car factories are highly automated plants that require skilled operators. In the case of the VW Xinjiang, that was QC inspectors. There’s no way a hole in the wall car factory using outdated labor practices can come close to competing against modern production.