The IRS has taken plenty of flack for paying stimulus checks to dead people, but a new inspector general’s audit says the agency also has the reverse problem: It refused to send checks to some living people, claiming they were already dead.
The inspector general originally flagged 77,868 accounts it said showed signs of being erroneously dead-locked as of Jan. 1, 2022. TheWhen the inspector general went back to update its numbers for 2022, it flagged another 14,193 accounts that may have been wrongly locked between Jan. 2 and Oct. 29 of that year.People’s accounts can be locked because of Social Security’s master death list, or because of an error at theDaniel C.
He said it can be as simple as a misplaced digit in a communication between a credit reporting agency and Social Security that leads to someone getting dead-locked. But the consequences aren’t so simple.Dealing with dead people has been a standing problem for the government.paid out $1.4 billion in stimulus checks to dead people. The agency said it didn’t think it was allowed to withhold the payments under the rules Congress had set.
Social Security maintains the main list, known as the Death Master File, usually known as the DMF among government agencies. The file is built based on alerts from family members, funeral homes, banks, the postal service and other agencies. Social Security will share the data in its files with other federal and state agencies that pay out benefits.In cases where a death isn’t reported, benefits can continue to be paid out improperly. In one case, the nephew of a woman who died in 1971 was still collecting her checks nearly 50 years later. The government also paid out a pandemic stimulus check in 2020.Sometimes that’s because a wrong report is sent in.
The inspector general looked at 9,646 notices issued as of the start of last year and found that more than 70% of the time, the accounts shouldn’t have been locked.locked even though the Social Security data didn’t flag them as deceased.
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