Also those identities can't collect checks, because if they tried it would set off alarm bells and reviews because they're over a standard "assume they're already dead" limit.

Imagine the brouhaha these same folks would be raising about "wasting your tax dollars hiring historians" if that other direction was in their self-interest.

This is also the same argument made against IRS audits on lower tax brackets. Basically, its not generally worth audits of low income citizens. Because the manpower required to perform the audit exceeds the revenues recovered.

Yet audits of individuals making < $25k per year is over 5.5 times higher than those in all other income brackets (1.27% vs 0.25%). So we chase down citizens when likely they probably don't even had a tax burden anyway. Maybe they misfiled some taxes and should be taxed a few hundred or even a thousand dollars more. But the manpower to chase down these little checks is a net negative on the department.

Sure, it is possible you find fraud in some of these low income cases. Someone claims to only make $25k but really they run a cash business and make $80k. But these are likely so limited thanks to other validations the IRS has access to, that the number of cases that reveal this is extremely tiny. So back to another argument on here, there an expectations that fraud is non-zero, and we accept that because getting fraud to zero is not worth the cost.