PORTLAND, Oregon — The Social Security Administration sent payments to a dead person in Oregon for 15 years, according to a federal audit. The Social Security Administration’s Inspector General found the agency issued benefits after the person died in December 2007 until June 2023 — totaling $261,306 in payments. The report did not identify the deceased person or explain what happened to the improper payments.
In another case, the federal review found the Social Security Administration sent payments to a deceased Oregonian for nearly 10 years. Although the person died in November 2012, auditors found the Social Security Administration continued issuing payments totaling $108,468 until May 2023.
According to the report, the Social Security Administration and the inspector general are currently reviewing payments made to 217 Oregonians who appear to be dead. The Social Security Administration already stopped sending benefits to 78 individuals, who received approximately $2 million in payments after their deaths. If the remaining beneficiaries are confirmed to be deceased, the inspector general estimates the Social Security Administration issued a total of roughly $10.2 million in payments to 217 people in Oregon after their deaths.
The inspector general compared death data from the Oregon Health Authority from 1971 through June 2022 with Social Security Administration records to determine whether deceased individuals were receiving improper federal benefits.
“We continually strive to improve stewardship of our programs and reduce improper payments. While staffing losses and resource constraints have challenged our service delivery, our payment accuracy rates remain very high,” said Shayla Hagburg, a regional spokesperson for the Social Security Administration.
Since 2017, the inspector general has compared Social Security records with death information from 29 states and Puerto Rico. According to audit reports posted on its website, the inspector general estimated the Social Security Administration has issued approximately $323 million in payments after death to 5,222 beneficiaries.
Typically, funeral directors or family members notify the Social Security Administration of a person's death. Their identifying information, including Social Security number, date of birth and date of death, is then added to the agency's Death Master File, a database that contains more than 85 million records of deaths dating back to 1936.
People who fail to report death information and continue to collect payments for deceased family members risk fraud charges and will be forced to repay the money.
The Social Security Administration is responsible for issuing monthly benefits to almost 67 million Americans, totaling about $1.4 trillion in benefits paid in 2023.
“Even the slightest error in the overall payment process can result in millions of dollars in improper payments,” the agency wrote in its annual financial report. The report estimated that the agency had made $7.4 billion in improper payments in fiscal year 2021, overpayments were about $6 billion of that.
“I’d like improper payments to be zero. We all would, but Social Security is actually doing a pretty good job of getting the money to people that are supposed to be receiving it,” explained Marc Goldwein of the non-profit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Goldwein said Social Security has greater accuracy in distributing benefits than other federal agencies because qualifying factors are fairly straightforward. You are eligible if you’re 62 or older, you’ve worked and paid Social Security taxes for 10 years or more — and you are still alive.
“If we’re thinking about where our government is wasting money and where we are sending payments they don’t belong — Social Security is pretty low on the list,” Goldwein explained. “We should be looking to Medicare, unemployment and various tax credits. That’s where a lot of the improper payments really are.”