Social Security states a person must be alive for the entire month to be eligible for a benefit check. Benefits are not payable for the month of death. According to the Wall Street Journal, The Social Security Administration’s inspector general on Monday said the agency improperly paid $31 million in benefits to 1,546 Americans believed to be deceased. In addition, the article stated the inspector general said the Social Security Administration had death certificate information on each person filed in the government database, suggesting it should have known the Americans had died and halted payments.
The report also states, according to Social Security, of the 1,546 deceased beneficiaries, the government made payments as if each person was alive for an average of 20 extra months. In February 2001, the Social Security Administration recorded information from the death certificate but kept making a total of $158,000 in payments through May 2012. The inspector general’s office made a number of recommendations that it says will prevent this from happening again. The IG (Office of Inspector General) report did not say who collected the money once the beneficiary passed away or if the government will seek to recoup the funds. Social Security pays benefits to more than 55 million people and this problem can cause a nightmare for public relations in the IG agency. Wall Street Journal also states a spokesman for the Social Security Administration said “there is room for improvement” but pointed out the agency had a 99.9% accuracy rate on these matters. “We terminated benefits to 2.1 million beneficiaries due to death in fiscal year 2011, so the 1,546 cases where payments continued represent less than one-tenth of one percent,” the agency spokesman emailed. This seems like an astonishingly low error ratio for a federal agency making over $700 billion payments benefit recipients every year. What is more unreasonable is Social Security is erroneously cutting people off their benefits meanwhile paying 1,546 people who are deceased.
