The Social Security Administration, the agency was charged with distributing one-time payments, sent about 89,000 bogus stimulus checks of $250 each to dead and jailed people according to a new inspector-general’s report.
The report said that of these payments, about 55,000, were sent because the recipients had died recently, and the Social Security Administration had not been informed of their deaths by states, families or funeral homes at the time the payments were sent. The remaining 17,000 of the mistaken payments were attributed to the Social Security Administration failing to properly process death records that it did have. The combined total of the bogus payments totals an astounding $22.3 million.
The Social Security Administration says that the stimulus package didn’t include a provision allowing it to try to retrieve funds that were mistakenly sent out, so it can’t try to retrieve the money.
A long-time campaigner against waste, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said, “This report highlights the broader problems with the Recovery Act itself. At a time like now, when nearly $350 billion in waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government annually has been reported and our national debt closing in on $13.5 trillion, these findings represent the epitome of congressional stupidity and a total disregard for accountability.”
Originally posted at No Sheeples Here.
2 comments:
Ah yes, another federal bureaucracy heard from.
Yet, these checks were cashed....Any one see anything else wrong with this?
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