Government paid 600 million in benefits to dead people
Friday, September 23, 2011
Gov't paid $600 million in benefits to dead
people
By Sam Hananel, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - 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.
Office of Personnel Management spokesman Edmund Byrnes said he
could not immediately comment on the findings. But the report said
OPM Director John Berry agrees that stopping the improper payments
should be a priority.
There are about 2.5 million federal workers who receive more
than $60 billion in benefit payments from the program each
year.
Federal officials have tried matching the fund's computer
records with the Social Security Administration's death records,
checking tax records and improving the timeliness of death
reporting.
OPM has also sampled its records of all recipients over 90 years
old to confirm whether they are still alive. In 2009, there were
more than 125,000 recipients identified as over 90 and about 3,400
over 100 years old.
Both the Obama administration and Congress have made it a higher
priority to crack down on improper government payments.
Last year, government investigators found that more than 89,000
stimulus payments of $250 each from the massive economic recovery
package went to people who were either dead or in prison.