




The first group are people who have died but are counted as alive in federal records. Their benefits keep coming. Millions of dollars pile up in unwatched accounts. Millions more are spent by feckless relatives. In one recent record-breaking case, a son stole his dead father's federal benefits for 26 years.

The second group includes living Americans — at least 750 new people every month — whom the system falsely lists as dead. And once you're on that list, it is not easy to get off. This summer in Utah, one man visited a Social Security office to protest his “death” in person. But the clerks wanted more evidence. They gave him a piece of paper, the man's son recalled.

They asked him to write on it, “I'm alive.”


In this case, the causes include familiar bad habits, such as the inattention of Congress, and inertia in the bureaucracy. A job that the government needs done — compiling a full and accurate list of the nation's dead — never really became anybody's job.

“We come into the world with nothing. And we leave this world with nothing,” said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del. Or at least, he said, that's how it's supposed to work. Now, Carper said, “as long as we have dead people getting benefits, there's still a Hail Mary [chance] at trying to take it with you. And if you can't take it with you, someone else is getting that money.”





But, somehow, they still get paid.

“Not to speak ill of the dead, but they're the least deserving of federal payments,” said Steve Ellis of the group Taxpayers for Common Sense. This is real money: Payments to the dead in recent years have totaled more than the annual budget of the Library of Congress. But the situation doesn't get fixed, Ellis said, because the cost is spread among all taxpayers — too wide and too thin to make anybody very mad.

“In the end, it's not enough money. And it's not enough of an issue to get people rallied around,” he said.


The list contains 90 million reports.

The problem is that not all of them are correct.



Instead, Social Security officials say, they maintain the list for their own narrower purpose — to stop dead people from receiving Social Security benefits. If a death is reported and the person wasn't getting Social Security payments (because, for example, he or she was too young), the agency doesn't verify that the report is correct.



“You're not going to believe this, but you're dead,” Patricia Jennings, 61, of Lyndon, Kan., said her accountant told her in 2010. The federal government was refusing to accept her tax return on the grounds that she had been dead since 1990.



“Nobody told me to do this. I just thought about it: I should just take my dad into the Social Security office here in Provo. Just show him in the flesh, just to show . . . he's alive,” said David Cleveland of Santaquin, Utah.

This past summer, Cleveland's mother died. For some reason, the federal government got the message that his father, Leonard Cleveland, 78, was dead instead.

“You need to write on this piece of paper that 'I'm alive,' ” he recalled the clerks in Provo saying. His father did, and signed it. They went home.

But that didn't fix it. So they went back to Provo.

“This time, he had to write another sentence . . . 'I'm alive, I showed my driver's license,' ” David Cleveland said. That didn't work, either. It took the intervention of Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, to get the records fixed.

So those are the dead living. But flaws in the same system — typos, clerical errors, unchecked death reports — also help create Washington's expensive living dead. In some cases, for instance, a death report is not matched to the right file. The dead person still appears alive. And still deserving of federal benefits.




“Had they stopped [paying the benefits], you know, within a respectful amount of time, I wouldn't have been able to borrow it,” the relative said. The relative asked not to be identified because of that criminal case.

When other agencies use the Social Security death file, its flaws become their flaws. The agency does warn that its data are incomplete and partly unverified, but other agencies still use the file because there's no better list available for administrative purposes.

For instance, the Social Security data are used by a federal program that checks people's eligibility to work in the United States and by another program that screens voter registrations. In recent cases documented by the Social Security inspector general, more than 100 people used a dead person's identity to be hired. In 180 other cases, someone used the identity of dead person to register to vote.

But in all those cases, no red flags were raised.



But the next step isn't to cut those people off.

It's to send them a letter. And until recently, if the letter came back signed, the “dead” person was deemed alive. The benefits continued to flow. Most of the time, according to the agency's inspector general, nobody checked to make sure the signature on the letter matched previous signatures from the same person.




He wasn't. In fact, he had been dead since 1983. By that time, the junior McHenry had stolen 26 years of his father's benefits, at least $1.1 million. The crime had gone on so long that he said he forgot why he started.


Cases like this add up. In 2011, the Office of Personnel Management's inspector general reported that $120 million a year was being wrongly paid to dead retirees.


In other places around Washington, there are similar glitches that make the dead look alive. At several agencies, officials aren't even allowed to look at the complete Death Master File. Because of rules limiting how widely death data from states can be shared, the Social Security Administration limits the full list to a handful of large benefit-paying agencies.



“Most people on the outside think, 'Well, that'd be real easy, just to get two government agencies to compare notes,' ” he said. “Well, it's not.”

Now, after years of inattention, President Barack Obama and two senators have laid out ideas to improve the system. In his 2014 budget, Obama requested $22 million to improve the death reports that come in from states by upgrading their systems to transmit faster and more accurate data.

In the Senate, Carper and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., have written a bill that would require all federal agencies to check the Death Master File before paying benefits. It would also give all agencies access to the full file, not just the partial one. And it would require new efforts to make sure the data in the file are accurate.


As these cases go, his late relative did not “live” that long. Newman's father died in 2007. But four years had passed, and $79,105 had been paid, before official Washington seemed to realize it.