NO Pay Database?

That's the word from the Post on a Friday Obama memo:

A memo Obama is set to sign Friday instructs the Treasury Department, Office of Management and Budget and General Services Administration to establish a government-wide database to ensure agencies no longer send government checks to dead people, delinquent or jailed contractors and other debarred or suspended firms, said officials familiar with the memo and not authorized to speak on the record. About 20,000 separate payments totaling $182 million were sent to dead people in the last three years, according to OMB.

If we were implementing this back in FSA in the 1990's (back in the day, my children, back in the day), we'd probably like to submit a file containing a tax id number(s) to someone, who would return a code saying whether the id was eligible for payment, and if not, why not.  That would hide the database and give everyone one interface routine to write to. The timing of the interface is going to be a problem, I'd suspect. FSA is probably one of the few agencies which would have several hundred thousand payments being processed at the same time; that is, unless they bounce payrolls against the database.