SSA suspends benefit payments for a variety of reasons. Suspending benefits stops ongoing monthly payments, and SSA technicians receive alerts to resolve the reason for the suspension. However, SSA does not initiate actions to recover payments made after a beneficiary’s death until technicians add death information and terminate the payment record.
We identified three populations of beneficiaries who were in suspended payment status as of December 2019. We used death data from 24 States to identify approximately 5,000 beneficiaries in suspended payment status who were deceased according to State death records. We then identified about 6,000 beneficiaries suspended for development of unverified death reports. Finally, we used data analytics to identify approximately 23,000 beneficiaries suspended for address development who we determined were likely deceased. We randomly selected and reviewed 100 beneficiaries from each of the three populations (300 total).
Findings
We determined 263 (88 percent) of the 300 sampled beneficiaries in suspended payment status had died before December 2019. These deceased beneficiaries remained in suspended payment status because SSA (1) technicians did not follow existing policy for beneficiaries suspended for death development, (2) did not have adequate controls to identify beneficiaries suspended for address development who were likely deceased, and (3) policy does not consistently instruct technicians to search for or recognize all available sources of death information. Additionally, SSA policy does not provide sufficient information to guide technicians when they post a beneficiary’s unverified death based on a returned payment from Treasury, which results in erroneous dates of death on SSA records.
Because of these control weaknesses, we estimate SSA issued approximately $298 million in payments to about 24,000 deceased beneficiaries in suspended payment status. SSA did not initiate actions to recover these payments, but it did receive approximately $84 million in recovered funds. SSA erroneously recorded about $33 million of the returned funds as underpayments. We estimate SSA has neither recovered approximately $214 million of the payments nor recorded approximately 24,000 beneficiaries’ death information in the Numident. ...
Note that there is literally zero concern expressed over the fact that Social Security suspended payments to people who were still alive based upon unverified death reports. In fact, OIG is eager to have Social Security cut off benefits to many more people whom they regard as "likely" dead even though some of them are certainly alive. Would "likely" be a high enough standard for you if one of your loved ones got cut off benefits because some bureaucrat thought they were "likely" dead even though they were very much alive? Remember that when Social Security decides you’re dead, you don’t just lose your cash benefits, you lose your Medicare and all your bank accounts and credit cards are frozen.