You might have seen a recent tweet from Elon Musk suggesting that finding duplicate Social Security Numbers in a government database is a clear sign of "massive fraud."

And let's be honest, at first glance, that sounds pretty bad, right? If you're picturing a big Excel spreadsheet, you'd think every person should only be listed once.

But here's the thing… a giant government database is not an Excel spreadsheet. (Who's gonna tell him? Probably many already have.)

Let's say the government pays a Social Security recipient in July.

A record of that payment goes into the database, tagged with their SSN.

Then August rolls around. They get paid again. Another record of that payment goes into the database, tagged with the same SSN.

Look at that! We now have duplicate SSNs. Is it a massive fraud ring? Nope. It's just… Tuesday. Or, you know, a record of two separate payments made to the exact same person.

Our “Cutting-Edge” Tech (That’s Decades Old)

This is where all the data pros roll their eyes, because we've had this wild, cutting-edge technology to handle this for ages. It's called SQL.

When data analysts (and yes, plot twist, government employees who use SQL do exist) want a list of people, not payments, they don't just hit "Control+F."

They just ask the database, "Hey, can you show me only the unique SSNs?" And poof! The database filters out all the payment records and just gives them a clean list of individuals.

And look, even Excel can do this! Not that I would ever recommend storing the entire country's personal data in a single Excel spreadsheet on a desktop.

(Seriously, please don't do that. They're not doing that… right? 🤨)

So, next time you see "duplicates" in a database, remember it's probably not fraud. It's just a logbook.