The Federal Government Admits It Paid $600 Million to Dead People
Saturday September 24th, 2011 • Posted by David Theroux at 3:51pm PDT • 2 Comments
The Big Winners
Sam Hananel at the Associated Press reports that despite knowing about the problem since 2005:
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 payment—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. . . .
For the full article, please click here.
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All of these dead people collecting these checks will be the same ones coming out to vote for Obama in 2012.