Posted on 12/29/2013 5:53:21 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Uncle Sam, always generous to a fault with taxpayers' money, doled out about $108 billion in Social Security benefits to the dead in 2012. Give or take a few billion, over a decade that's about $1 trillion going to folks who crossed the River Styx. Or more likely their kin, who may or may not take portions of the proceeds to decorate their loved ones' graves.
The Washington Times reported on Friday that the Social Security Administration does a spotty job tracking Social Security recipients' deaths, hence the dollars for the dead.
Reports the Times:
"Because SSA does not verify death reports from sources it considers most accurate, the agency risks having erroneous information in its death data, such as including living individuals or not including deceased individuals," it said.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
gee that amount of waste would have covered a few veteran pensions, wouldn’t it?
But no
Congressman Paul Ryan and the GOP are proud to have “saved” $6 billion on the backs of former warriors
WASHINGTON — The Social Security Administration each month falsely reports that nearly 1,200 living Americans have died.
These clerical errors, found in a federal database ominously titled the “Death Master File,” might be darkly humorous — evoking Mark Twain’s famous quip that death reports can be greatly exaggerated — were not the consequences so severe.
“It has just been one thing right after another since I found out that I was dead,” said an unsmiling Judy C. Rivers, 58, of Jasper, Ala. “Right now, I am still looking for a job. I hate to give out my Social Security number because I know exactly what is going to happen.”
Read more here.
She’s 58 and receiving social security?
Survivor benefits from a deceased spouse?
So, they’re giving out money and benefits to the dead, while declaring thousands dead who wind up losing their benefits and suffering untold troubles... From my article:
Snip: Hinkle said about one in every 200 entries the Social Security Administration makes to the Death Master File is false because of “inadvertent keying errors” by federal workers. That means 14,000 people are wrongly listed as deceased among the approximately 2.7 million deaths reported annually, Hinkle said.
Snip: Scripps Howard News Service easily obtained the full names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and residential ZIP codes of nearly 32,000 living Americans — the kind of information that is automatically released when people die. Experts warn that this information is all a thief would need to commit many kinds of identity fraud.
Unbelievable. My father died in October on a Saturday and by noon on Monday my brother and I had notified Social Security, DoD (as he was retired AF), and OPM since he also retired from GSA. There’s no excuse to not notify except to be able to keep the money coming in!
Be warned, when a family member on SS dies, the government demands a *refund* of that money back to the start of the month. They always revert to the start of that month.
This means that if the family member dies on the last day of July, all of July goes back to the government, no matter if its been spent. Failure to do so could result in a lien on the estate of the deceased.
River Styx is in Hell, I believe.
It's not like that with pensions.
Of course they will still get checks; they still vote for Dimacrats!
Not exactly “in,” you cross it to get there, mythologically speaking, on a gonola guided by a hooded skeletal figure representing death, I forget his name. Charon?
Just do like I’m doing and claim to be a dead, fake pig farmer, fake EPA secret agent who is unsure of my gender. It’s a gold mine.
Just wait till bad information gets into your file in the national healthcare database....
Most of us who will soon cross the “river” won’t have to worry as there is still some, albeit a small amount of money left in SS. Won’t be long, since millions are unemployed, there won’t be enough money coming INTO SS to pay anything or anyone.
This was once a pretty great country but since gubmint has gotten sooooooo large and soooooooo many lawyers are now at the gubmint trough, we are all doomed.
It doesn’t say she’s collecting social security. The SSA tracks all the numbers, whether you’re collecting benefits or not.
This means that if the family member dies on the last day of July, all of July goes back to the government, no matter if its been spent. Failure to do so could result in a lien on the estate of the deceased.”””
Every Social Security check is payment for the PRIOR month, which has already passed. IF you die on the last day of the month- you will not get paid anything for the month, which is plain wrong, IMO. A person certainly had living expenses for the month, less ONE DAY.
IF a person gets their SS deposit on the 3rd of the month, and had died on the last day of the prior month—4 days earlier, then I can see why the money would accidently be in the account, and the family should NOT touch such funds.
However, I get my SS funds on the 4th Wednesday of the month—and I am already 75%+ into that new month before I get funds for the prior month.
I think that you will find that the conservative families would not touch funds if a person died , however I would like to see research on whether Liberal families would try to defraud.
SSA to Alas Babylon: That's just our way of solving this type trifling issues, move along now.
Here in Kalifornia, notification is done by the mortuary...my mother died on the last day of a February, and within four days SSA had yanked the entire previous month’s benefit from her bank account.
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