Gov't paid $600 million in benefits to dead people

[Locutus]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal government has doled out more than $600 million in benefit payments to dead people over the past five years, a watchdog report says.
Such payments are meant for retired or disabled federal workers, but sometimes the checks keep going out even after the former employees pass away and the deaths are not reported, according to the report this week from the Office of Personnel Management's inspector general, Patrick McFarland.
In one case, the son of a beneficiary continued receiving payments for 37 years after his father's death in 1971. The payments - totaling more than $515,000 - were only discovered when the son died in 2008.
The government has been aware of the problem since a 2005 inspector general's report revealed defects in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. Yet the improper payments have continued, despite more than a half dozen attempts to develop a system that can figure out which beneficiaries are still alive and which are dead, the report said.
"It is time to stop, once and for all, this waste of taxpayer money," it said.




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[Bar Sinister]

Surely it should not be too difficult for someone to develop a program in which recipients prove their continued existence by responding to a government letter of inquiry one a year. This is common practice in the insurance industry and should be just as common in government.

 

[Kreskin]

Surely it should not be too difficult for someone to develop a program in which recipients prove their continued existence by responding to a government letter of inquiry one a year. This is common practice in the insurance industry and should be just as common in government.

True, but it might cost $700 mil to operate over 5 years.

 

[SLM]

True, but it might cost $700 mil to operate over 5 years.

I'd say that's a conservative estimate.

 

[JLM]

Well, at least they won't squander it!

That's one of the problems with direct deposits.................wouldn't happen if you had to endorse cheques.

 

[taxslave]

Well, at least they won't squander it!

That's one of the problems with direct deposits.................wouldn't happen if you had to endorse cheques.

How many dead people do you know that still have bank accounts? My bet is that living government employees are diverting these cheques into their own accounts.
When my father died it didn't take long for revenue canada to want the last pension cheque back.

 

[Tonington]

It can't be difficult to write a program that checks tax returns to the IRS.