From the Herald-News:
A Klamath Falls man is facing federal charges for cashing more than $458,000 worth of social security checks issued in the name of his deceased aunt.
George Doumar, 76, has been charged with theft of public funds and mail theft.
According to court documents, in February 2020 the Social Security Administration identified a 114-year-old supercentenarian who appeared to be the second-oldest living person in the U.S. receiving Social Security retirement benefits.
SSA systems indicated that no updates had been made to the person’s benefit record in more than 30 years, leading staff to believe that the person may be deceased. ...
The might also want to take a look at the oldest supposedly living person receiving Social Security benefits; maybe the top 10 or even 100.
5 comments:
They are supposed to look at anyone turning 100 and folks that are old but not that old that haven't used health insurance in a few years. Not sure how this one slipped through the gaps.
Thought the switch over to direct deposit or debit cards was supposed to eliminate most of this. Used to hear a lot of people stealing Social Security checks out of mailboxes. Was told the SSA switched to no more checks mainly due to mailing costs. But it was helped with fraud.
I could see how the stimulus check was mailed. Wonder if this pandemic never happened how long the SSA would not notice?
Social Security used to publicize everyone turning 100 with calling local reporters or the like. I always suspected that at least part of that was to see if they were sill alive.
10:14 suggested that Social Security should be cross checking to see if anyone over a certain age is using health insurance and check of they're not. This should be easy enough to do and there inso reason to start at age 100. It is hard to imagine that there are very many people even 70 and over who get Social Security benefits and are on Medicare that are not seeing doctors at least yearly. And, if checking shows they're fine, then good for them, but the savings could be enormous. These are not all that isolated cases.
I think that when SSA does check, they make face to face visits and require ID. So it would actually take quite a bit of time to do this for younger people. Does SSA pay a lot of dead people? It is hard to say but these cases seem to be somewhat isolated.
SSA is actually pretty active in this field, but the individual cases like these that slip through are obviously pretty embarrassing.
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