’72,000 stimulus payments went to dead people’ in the amount of $600 million, and lets see how much more was added to that with ‘SELF-DECLARATION OF U.S.. CITIZENSHIP FOR MEDICAID.’

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.

72,000 stimulus payments went to dead people

SELF-DECLARATION OF U.S.. CITIZENSHIP FOR MEDICAID.

Daniel R. Levinson Inspector General 2005 
Forty seven States allow self-declaration of US Citizenship for Medicaid;

G.W. Bush US President in 2005

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.

October 8, 2010 

Dead people & inmates are still getting stimulus money

n a new $787 billion stimulus accountability report a government investigator found that more than 89,000 people received stimulus payments of $250 each. The lucky recipients were people (using the term loosely) whom were either in a graveyard or in prison.
According to the Social Security Administration’s inspector general, $18 million stimulus dollars were mailed to at least 72,000 dead people. The same report offers some good news and estimates that half of those payments were returned to the federal government.  Another disturbing figure included in the Social Security’s Inspector General Report was the fact $4.3 million was distributed to more than 17,000 prison inmates.

There are about 2.5 million federal workers who receive over $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.more at cbsnews