About 58 dead people received $1,111,000 in Social Security benefits last year a new report says. Of course, it wasn’t the dead people who got the money but thieves scamming the system.
I guess we might be surprised that it was only just over a million!
The Social Security Administration (SSA) improperly paid about $1,111,000 to deceased or likely deceased beneficiaries, according to a SSA Office of Inspector General (OIG) report.
The report titled, “Payments Deposited into Bank Accounts After Beneficiaries are Deceased,” was created to determine the effectiveness of SSA’s “procedures for recovering payments improperly deposited into Title II beneficiaries’ bank accounts after their deaths.”According to the SSA, Title II benefits are disability benefits, because they fall under Title 2 of the Social Security Act, where disability benefits are addressed.
“SSA did not effectively recover direct deposit payments to bank accounts after beneficiaries’ deaths because the Agency did not always determine when suspended beneficiaries had died,” states the report. “We concluded that 58 of the 59 beneficiaries we reviewed had died or were likely deceased.
“We estimate that SSA improperly paid about $1,111,000 to the 58 deceased or likely deceased beneficiaries,” states the report. “While SSA recovered about $35,000 paid after the deaths of the six beneficiaries it terminated, the Agency did not attempt to recover payments from the other beneficiaries.”
Pure waste. But most government spending is pure waste.