"Dead people were ineligible to get the payments. But, the report said, there is no provision in the law to recover payments incorrectly sent to dead people."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101008/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_stimulus_checks_dead_people
And the beat goes on . . .
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"The inspector general's report said that if similar payments are authorized in the future, prison inmates should be ineligible and the government should be able to recover payments made to dead people.
The Social Security Administration agreed with the recommendations."
Well... ya think???
One often finds that self-proclaimed professionals, those with additional letters after their names, other formal titles or high rankings in bureaucracies are often the most idiotic and clueless.
Statistics and mathematics. How many people were eligible for stimulus payments? These were the Bush payments of "Spend money or they will win" payments. EVERYBODY got one. I don't pay taxes, but I got one too ($300), so I'm sure everyone got one. Would you be willing to say, 150,000,000 Americans got some? If you divide 72,000 by 150,000,000, you end up with .00048. That's about five tenths of one percent. The stimulus payments took six months to go from decision to payment. I wonder how many people die in a six month period? Suddenly this looks like non-news.
"In all, the $250 payments were sent to about 52 million people who receive either Social Security or Supplemental Security Income, at a cost of about $13 billion."
So, it's 3X your percentage, but I grant you that it is still small, as a percentage. Nonetheless, $18 million to 72,000 dead people is a lot of money to me. Even if the Social Security Administration recovers half of that, as they "estimate," that leaves $9 million, plus the $4.3 million that went to prisoners and won't be recovered because it was legal.
"Social Security spokesman Mark Lassiter said, 'Inaccurate payments are unacceptable. Social Security's Recovery Act payments were 99.8 percent accurate and we quickly collected the majority of the inaccurate payments. Each year we make payments to a small number of deceased recipients usually because we have not yet received reports of their deaths.'"
They peg it at 0.2%. Still a small percentage.
It's not a matter of how many people die in 6 months, it's a matter of how many deaths of Social Security or SSI recipients go unreported in 6 months, if that is the time frame. 72,000? Unreported deaths wouldn't result in just a one time payment to the dead recipients. In most cases, monthly payments would continue until the death is reported or discovered. Even if we assume that half are eventually reported/caught, that's 72,000 additional dead people getting benefits each year. I wonder if they get Medicare, too?
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