From Cox Media Group:
The Social Security Administration plays a critical role in helping people with financial relief in their later years of life, but for some people, the checks don’t ever stop.
“What we found is their books are a mess,” said Adam Andrzejewski with OpenTheBooks.com.
He shared data with us that showed 6 million Social Security numbers that were active for people aged 112-years-old and older.
“Here’s the problem: there’s only 40 of those people alive in the entire world,” Andrzejewski said. “Last year, Social Security paid out $8 billion improperly.” ...
A bill has been introduced in the Senate to stop dead people from receiving these payments, but Andrzejewski said it has gone nowhere.
I have no idea whether the 6 million number is accurate but 6 million who are not listed as dead is not the same thing as 6 million dead people receiving benefits. This is so wildly misleading that it raises questions about the motivations of the people behind this "revelation".
In the end, if you want better efforts to police the death master file, you want to give the Social Security Administration a lot more money for its operating budget. You could, in the alternative, ask whether maintaining the list of dead people should even be the responsibility of the Social Security Administration.
4 comments:
Went to the web page for the group. Saw under "Exclusive Clips" a One America News report about Dominion voting systems. Uhhh.. Really? Board of the group - leans hard right, which as "fiscal watchdogs", makes sense. ONe is a member of The Heartland Institute so nuff said about motivations. And about whether or not accuracy is involved. Just want to make people mad about "misspending" with the aim of reducing spending, so facts don't really matter.
SSA tried to find out if the elderly has passed years ago. They compared Medicare non-usage with the very elderly still on benefits. They contacted them to verify existence, then cancelled the program, allegedly because of adverse effects of the contacting.
The Social Security Administration used to have this system where all insured workers everyone got $255.00 for their family when they died, the lump sum death benefit. Because it was nearly universal, Funeral Directors had the forms and would file for the family suggesting it could be used to defray expenses of the funeral.
But when Congress limited the death benefit to surviving spouses and dependents, and the number of those entitled dropped along with the number of cases immediately notifying the SSA of deaths. Way to save money. As a result, there are many more cases of people dying and with direct deposit, money continuing to be paid after death. Most of the money is recovered but by no means all. Way to save money.
Yes, not listed as deceased is not at all the same as dead receiving benefits. But that is not to say the SSA could not be doing a better job in this regard.
This is a far, far more complex issue than you would think it is at first glance. I had a co-worker a few years ago who did a detail with the Office of Systems and this is one of the projects she worked on while she was there.
Most of these people (I don't know if the 6 million number is accurate or not, but it seems like it could be relative to the generational population of the US) are in suspended benefit status, meaning no cash benefits or Medicare benefits are being paid on them. And, reinstating one isn't a simple thing (it would require actions by the payment centers who will demand absolute proof the person is alive). So, there is no monetary loss.
SSA has some access to electronic death records maintained by some of the states. However, the records involving these people are often paper records that require extensive manual searches. Plus, you don't know where or when they might have died. So, SSA would literally have to conduct extensive and expensive searches of large (50+year blocks) of death records in every single jurisdiction within the US that maintains death records to try to find proof of death. And, even then, you wouldn't find all of them because the identifying information won't match SSA records, some of them may have died and weren't found or were unidentifiable, or they may have died in foreign countries (remember, the the further back you go, the easier it was to cross the border without a passport. A lot of the suspended people my co-worker was assigned to look at had Latino and foreign surnames).
And, none of these people have a valid address or phone number for contact attempt purposes in SSA records. So it becomes a situation where where SSA isn't paying benefits (no financial loss), we can't prove the people are dead without spending untold millions of dollars to search nationwide for proof they are dead (with no guarantee we'll even find anything).
So, the most cost effective solution is to leave them suspended. Once they have passed the age where they can't possibly still be alive, SSA will terminate them retroactively as deceased back to the date they were originally suspended.
Problem solved.
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