The rise of Social Security zombies

Mary Beth Franklin dishes on how the Social Security Administration sends millions in benefits to deceased people...and how, in some cases, people who are very much alive are declared dead.

So soon after Halloween and the Mexican Day of the Dead that celebrates the return of spirits of the deceased, I couldn’t resist sharing a great story from Monday’s Washington Post entitled “Why the dead get government checks”.

Reporter David Fahrenthold wrote a compelling account about how outdated the federal government’s system of tracking deaths is, resulting in millions of dollars in benefits being sent to people who have died. “In the past few years, Social Security paid $133 million to beneficiaries who were deceased,” according to the Post article.

And in some cases, people who are very much alive are declared dead.

The article includes a graphic depiction illustrating how deaths are tracked, starting when a death is reported to the Social Security Administration by state agencies, funeral directors, family members, hospitals or other sources. The SSA is supposed to cancel a dead person’s benefits and then add the report to the “Death Master File” to which other federal agencies can refer.

About 2.5 million Americans die every year, but SSA receives about 7 million reports, often including duplicate records of the same death, according to the article.

One problem is not all reports are verified. For example, if a report comes in about a person who was not receiving Social Security benefits, such as someone who died before they were eligible, the SSA does not verify whether that information is accurate.

In addition, there’s human error. A typo or transposed Social Security number can result in a living person being counted as dead.

Once the information is received by SSA, the file is split in two: the full Death Master File is shared with key federal agencies responsible for benefits and tax information including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Internal Revenue Service, Office of Personnel Management and the Railroad Retirement Board.

SSA also creates a separate public file that includes only about 60% of reported deaths.

The Public Death Master File is a file of all deaths reported to SSA from sources other than states. The reason this public file is incomplete is that some states do not allow their data to be released to the public by the federal government for privacy reasons and because of legal restrictions.

This incomplete version of the Death Master File is used by a number of other federal agencies, including Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the Department of Agriculture and the Treasury Department.

The SSA acknowledges that the information in the public file is not complete and that the agency says it cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information, according to the SSA’s Public Death Master File fact sheet.

“The absence of a particular person on this file is not proof that the individual is alive,” according to the fact sheet. “Further, in rare instances it is possible for the record of a person who is not deceased to be included erroneously” in the [death master file].”

So why create a list that is knowingly incomplete?

It was required by a 1978 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The public death master file is made available through an agreement with the National Technical Information Service, which is a part of the Department of Commerce.

SSA began disclosing certain state records on the public file in 2002 but later determined that it could no longer disclose protected state records. So beginning in November 2011, the public record became even less complete.

SSA said it expected the yearly number of reported deaths to decrease by approximately 1 million. In addition, its historical public death file contained 89 million records dating back to 1936, which the agency said it expected to decrease by about 4.2 million records.

So is there a better way for the public to verify a death? Yes. The SSA suggests that you check with state vital statistics offices which are the first point of collection for death data.

I guess that means there are probably more federal zombies than state zombies. I can’t wait for this latest version of zombie wars to hit the theaters: “Night of the Living Feds.”