ALLENTOWN (TNS) — You can’t take it with you, as the saying goes.
But that hasn’t stopped the government from continuing to send money — lots of money — to people who are in their grave.
That mistake should be impossible. Yet it happens, repeatedly.
I’ve written about Uncle Sam paying for housing for dead people and about COVID-19 stimulus checks being sent to dead people. It’s happened with Social Securitypayments, too.
Now comes word that the Department of Veterans Affairs sent $677,000 to folks in the great beyond.
When mistakes like this occur, it’s not just a black eye for the government and a hit to taxpayers. It can be a burden to a veteran’s family because they are liable for returning the money. Repayments can be waived in cases of hardship.
The VA has a system to stop disability and pension payments to veterans after they die.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the system doesn’t always work.
When a veteran dies, the Veterans Benefits Administration often is notified by relatives or their funeral director. The agency doesn’t rely solely on volunteered information, though.
Nor should it.
Every week, the agency compares its list of payees with death records from the Social Security Administration. The process is automated and checks a veteran’s name, date of birth and Social Security number.
Investigators from the VA’s inspector general noticed that dozens of deceased veterans who still were receiving benefit payments had died within the same time period.
They dug further and discovered that one of the VA’s weekly comparisons against Social Security records had not occurred in December 2020, “because of an undetected issue with the automated process.”
Shouldn’t the system send an alert when there is a problem like that?
Why yes, it does. That system didn’t work, either.
If the matching process doesn’t run, the system sends an email. That email went “unnoticed” by staff, according to the inspector general.
The failure to run that one check resulted in payments continuing to 43 veterans that totaled more than $203,000. One veteran received more than $22,000 after death.
Payments continued to 29 veterans for seven months after they died, until the problem was unearthed by the inspector general. If the investigation hadn’t occurred, who knows when — or if — the mistake would have been caught.
Sadly, this wasn’t the first time that happened.
Weekly death matches also did not occur as scheduled in September 2018 and November 2019. The inspector general did not probe into those mistakes to determine the cost to taxpayers. I hope the VA reviewed its records to make sure all of those payments have stopped.
Even when the automated checks occur, there are opportunities for dead veterans to get paid.
That’s because the VA’s system is littered with inaccurate Social Security numbers.
The inspector general reviewed 140 veterans’ files and found that a whopping 87 of them — 62% — had incorrect Social Security numbers!
How can that happen? A few transposed numbers here or there might be acceptable.
But 62%?
Without accurate data, the comparison with Social Security death records won’t identify every veteran who has passed away.
Payments also continued to some deceased veterans because of insufficient internal communication within the VA.
The Veterans Health Administration is another arm of the VA. It runs hospitals such as the medical center in Wilkes-Barre, and clinics such as the one in Allentown.
It collects information about veterans who have died, from sources including the Department of Defense and National Cemetery Administration.
But the Veterans Benefits Administration does not tap into that information.
While those deaths eventually should be flagged through the comparison with Social Security records, they could be identified sooner through internal records, meaning benefits payments could be stopped sooner. That data also could be a way to identify deceased veterans whose payments were not stopped because of inaccurate Social Security numbers.
The inspector general found 16 examples of benefits still being paid to veterans who were marked as deceased in the health administration’s files. Payments to another 19 could have been stopped sooner if that information had been shared.
Erroneous payments continued for more than three years in one case. In total, they cost taxpayers nearly $474,000.
VA officials did not dispute the inspector general’s findings. They said they were taking steps to recoup the overpayments and improve processes to prevent future errors.
That sounds good, but don’t suddenly expect the VA to become a model of efficiency.
In the business world, if managers make poor decisions, if employees underperform, if systems fail, chances are that business won’t exist for long.
The government can’t go out of business.
It just chugs right along, regardless of how much money it wastes, regardless of how outdated its systems are, regardless of how many poor decisions are made.
The lack of accountability for taxpayer dollars is appalling in many ways. But nothing should irk taxpayers more than when we learn our money has been spent to pay dead people.
(Email Morning Call columnist Paul Muschick at paul.muschick@mcall.com.)
