The Washington Free Beacon reported that the SSA failed to cross-check its death records with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the agency charged with management of federal government employees. Thirty-five deceased employees were paid an average of $49,156 in Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) over the course of an average of 84 months.
In one of the 35 cases, an Ohio man who died in November, 2011 continued to receive OASDI benefits until October, 2015. The SSA paid $37,126 to the deceased worker before the SSA terminated the payments.
The report also revealed the SSA paid six additional workers after their deaths, a problem that could have been prevented had the SSA used the death records from OPM. In these six cases, the SSA relied on other sources for the death information instead of OPM. While the SSA terminated benefits once it learned of the workers’ deaths, it was delayed because of the sources it used.
The report also identified glaring issues among the 2.7 million death records the OPM provided to the inspector general upon request. The inspector general reported that 641,996 of the 2.7 million death records provided by OPM had issues such as invalid or missing data fields.
