If something costs more to fix than it costs to leave sitting around, fixing it is less efficient. In this case it's already been investigated prior to DOGE, and deemed not worth the effort to clean up [1].

[1] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

To quote patio11,

“The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero

He was talking about the banking system. But he was also hinting at something bigger. There is a game theory problem often referred to as the meter maid problem. What is the optimal amount of meter maids in a city, where optimal can be defined in at least a few different ways, but roughly means the cost to revenue optimal. You end up with a couple of obvious extremes, no parking enforcement means no cost, but no revenue (plus parking may end up out of control if charging for parking is more than just revenue generating). The other extreme is thay you have enough people policing parking that no one ever fail to comply, this is the highest cost, but not the highest revenue, because you don’t get revenue from ticketing. So the answer is that the optimal number lies somewhere where the number of meter maids allows some percentage of people get away with failing to comply with parking rules (whether deliberate or accidental can further complicate the problem since both will happen).

So back to your steelman. Cleaning data is most certainly a desirable thing, but it is likely not the optimal thing, especially if the cost is high. And unauditable access to systems is a very high cost. Seems to me much of this auditing could be done in a much more acciuntable way.

Why spend money chasing people who aren't collecting checks? That sounds like waste to me.

> these 140/150 year old recipients

What is the evidence these exist?