The U.S. government has a problem with dead people. For one thing, it pays them way too much money.Yeah, but can you buy votes for any less?
In the past few years, Social Security paid $133 million to beneficiaries who were deceased. The federal employee retirement system paid more than $400 million to retirees who had passed away. And an aid program spent $3.9 million in federal money to pay heating and air-conditioning bills for more than 11,000 of the dead.
And how does the WaPo know this? Or are they just making up numbers?
These mistakes are part of a surprising glitch at the heart of the federal bureaucracy. Because of a jury-rigged and outdated system meant to track deaths, the government has trouble determining exactly which Americans are deceased.
As a result, Washington is bedeviled by both the living dead and the dead living.
As long as they vote correctly, who cares?
The first group are people who have died but are counted as alive in federal records. Their benefits keep coming. Millions of dollars pile up in unwatched accounts. Millions more are spent by feckless relatives. In one recent recÂord-breaking case, a son stole his dead father's federal benefits for 26 years.
"Stole" being the operative word. I trust he's in the slammer now?
The second group includes living Americans -- at least 750 new people every month -- whom the system falsely lists as dead. And once you're on that list, it is not easy to get off. This summer in Utah, one man visited a Social Security office to protest his "death" in person. But the clerks wanted more evidence. They gave him a piece of paper, and asked him to write on it, "I'm alive."In Washington, these failures have become a long-running case study in how government systems break -- and stay broken.
The task of tracking deaths for the federal bureaucracy is an enormous one; about 2.5 million Americans die each year. Federal officials say the vast majority of these cases are handled correctly: The death is recorded. Government money is no longer sent to that person.
But they can continue to vote, depending on who is counting.
In 2011 alone, auditors found, Medicare paid $23 million for services provided to dead people. From 2009 to 2011, it spent $8.2 million on medical equipment prescribed by doctors who had been dead for at least a year. The causes seemed to include poor record-keeping, sometimes exploited by fraudsters.
No! Say it ain't so! Fraud?
For government watchdogs, these are some of the most fixable -- and therefore the most maddening -- mistakes that the government makes. A big part of the frustration stems from the fact that there is no interest group fighting to keep the flawed status quo: The dead do not lobby.But, somehow, they still get paid.
The same root cause as most of what ails the US - Somebody Else's Money™
"Not to speak ill of the dead, but they're the least deserving of federal payments," said a spokesperson for the group Taxpayers for Common Sense. But the situation doesn't get fixed, he said, because the cost is spread among all taxpayers -- too wide and too thin to make anybody very mad.