Everyone has at some point in their life encountered impenetrable stupid government bureaucracy that views you not as a real person but merely some identity number in their records. It sounds like a plot from a crime movie where a villain falsifies his death to escape justice. We would think that can never happen in real life. Don't be so sure, according to this article, every day 35 mistakes made by the US SSN office in data entry and many people are prematurely declared dead.

So, what happens with you when you are officially dead. Your pension and benefit payments stop, your health insurance is canceled, bank accounts frozen, and you won't be able to a get job because, you know, dead people cannot work. Hopefully there is a system in place to correct such mistakes and some temporary inconveniences are just a small price for the perfectly computerized system of governance.

One vulnerability is that a Social Security Number (SSN) does not contain a check digit, so it is easy to make mistakes when typing. But apparently to wikipedia the guy in India had to fight the corrupted government for 18 years to force it recognize that he is not dead. His peculiar status instigated him to start an association of dead people and he has managed to find more 20,000 others who are also non-entities in the eyes of the government. And the most shocking part is that despite making such publicity and turning government's attention to their cases, they managed to restore the living status only for 4 persons. In seems that in most cases the fraudulent death certificate was acquired by their greedy relatives who wanted to get hands on their property a bribed government officials to receive inheritance.

There is no perfect thing in this world. If someone says that he has created a perfect system then we should be very afraid of it. Mistakes always happen therefore it is very important to establish proper procedures that enable to make necessary corrections timely and efficiently. I think that it is better to avoid too much perfection with strict constraints but rather include some margin that allows occasional override of rules. Computer models, however perfect, can never fully reflect the real life. For the IT science there should be more interest about self-correcting, self-healing systems.