This is NOT rocket science.
37 Million seems like a lot of money to us, but to be honest, the govt would spend more correcting the problem.
Why are the relatives not being arrested for FRAUD??? Long-term theft by stealing checks amounts to much more than the piddling amounts stolen from shops and malls that have resulted in long jail sentences.
“SSA issued payments to 3,925 beneficiaries who had dates of death in VA’s records,” the inspector general said. “Our audit results indicated that at least 11 percent of these beneficiaries were alive, and death information in VA’s records was erroneous. However, our audit results also indicated that at least 19 percent of these beneficiaries were deceased, and death information in VA’s records was accurate.”
but 19% were incorrectly receiving benefits.
so on average not doing to bad...................
Sorry technology won’t solve the problem. Keeping an accurate database impossible, it is a moving target. The amazing thing is not that it is so screwed up. The amazing thing is that it works at all.
I don’t know the answer except that nothing will change until the money runs out.
As El Rushbo might say, from the Groove Yard of Forgotten Favorites; here’s just one reason Social Security keeps sending checks to dead people:
Yep, the Social Security Administration reports 6.5 million active social security numbers for individuals over the age of 112. For Senator Franken (and others who are math impaired), there are less than 40 people worldwide who are at least 112 and still living. Given those facts, you’d think it would be pretty easy to dig through those active numbers, find out who they belong to, and arrest the fraudsters. My guess is that virtually no progress has been made on that issue since it was first reported two years ago.
I recall a case from a few years ago that highlights this problem. Social Security discovered they were still sending a monthly check to a man who was 117 years old. Problem was, he had died 40 years earlier; his son never reported the death and kept pocketing the monthly benefit check. The fraud wasn’t discovered until the son passed away in his 70s.
Multiply this example by thousands of times, and you begin to see the iceberg that is Social Security fraud.
Addendum: while the government admitted it had 6.5 million active social security numbers for individuals at least 112 years old, they never disclosed the number who were getting a check (I’m guessing thousands). And it’s a safe bet that many of those folks are still getting a monthly check, as they advance towards their 120th birthday (in the alternate universe of social security database maintenance and fraud prevention).