This is maybe one of the most stupidest ways for the government to lose our parents tax paying money. It was found that the Social Security Administrations sent out more than 89,000 stimulus payments of $250 each to people who were either dead or in prison. These payments were a part of last year's massive economic recovery package that were meant to increase consumer spending to help stimulate the economy; however, when you give money to people that are unable to spend this money because they are either dead or incarcerated, it doesn't work because they can't spend it. I don't understand why tax payers money was being sent to people in-order to stimulate the economy. Yeah i understand the money is meant for people's social security and many of those people are living on that money, but they usually save it or spend that money on things really important such as food.72,000 of those people that received that money, which was about $18 million, went to people who were dead. However, it was reported that a little more than half of those payments were returned. I don't get what happen to the other 36,000 payments that were given out. Can family members of the deceased actually use those checks even though they aren't the person that the check was issued to. Also, the other 17,000 people that received hat money, which was an additional $4.3 million, went to people who were in prison. The reason they received their checks was because they were newly incarcerated and had been receiving social security before they were locked up.
These mistakes may have only been .02% inaccurate from the 99.8% that were accurate, but that .02% translated into money is $22.3 million. The Social Security Administration's inspector general should be more up to date with these things. This is not only the SSA's fault but also Congress' fault to for not fully thinking through the provisions needed to govern these payments. If both groups were on top of everything, they would have not lost 22.3 million dollars and everything still would of been fine. How are we expected to et out of this recession when programs like the SSA are losing large amounts of money.
Tom Coburn R-Okla summed up how i feel "These findings are yet another example of congressional stupidity and a lack of accountability." Also, the SSA was trying to brag that they finished and sent out checks earlier which was a major accomplishment for they agency; however, maybe all the fast work was the reason for their screw up.
There are many thins to consider to the fault for this but i feel it was the agency issuing payments about 30 days earlier that they had to was the reason why there was this 22.3 million dollar mess up.
4 comments:
Yeah, this is pretty sad but not so surprising. I actually didn't know before reading this blog post that you don't receive social security if you're incarcerated, but again, it makes sense. I figured they could always send the money to help support their family.
A .02% margin of error is really not so terrible, but more unfortunate that these mistakes are bound to happen when the stimulus payments account for such a large sum of money.
I wonder how much government money is lost every year just from careless mistakes? I'm guessing a whole lot.
I agree, yeah the government just wated a lot of money that could of been spent on other things that would actually benefit the people. However, from the government's stand point, it's not like they could do much to help it. They were just trying to look out for the American people and provide them with sufficient Social Security. They couldn't look into the future and see who was going to die or go to jail before their social security was issued or saved up. So they just saved money and issued money to them like they're supposed to. It's not like they can say guess who is going to die and go to jail and not give money to them. What if they don't go to jail or die? What happens to their money? What I'm saying is that yes it was a big waste of money. However, the government was just simply trying to do their job and issue Social Security to people.
I understand completely what you are saying Chris Chan; however, the government and the SSA should of checked, before issuing the social security checks, if anyone was incarcerated. In understand that sometimes the SSA sends checks to people that have died because they were not informed yet, that's not their faults that's the family's fault for not informing them, but i think they should just check up on every person receiving Social Security and make sure they are not in prison or jail. Yeah that may be a time consuming process, but when it comes to millions on dollars i think its worth checking so you don't mistakenly send checks to people locked up. Also, to add to this, the SSA even said they were early on sending out social security checks which means they had left over time that they could of used for checking to see if people were locked up. i feel that the SSA and government need to use their time sparingly and really be efficient with these things because that money is coming out of our parents pay checks.
I am amazed that the government could make a mistake as serious as this. Wasting 23.3 million dollars of tax money for people who cannot spend it. There must have been someone who was being lazy in their job and I think deserves to be fired. All the money we lost could have gone to other programs such as education and health. I am starting to be swayed into the idea that we should stop using our tax money for stimulis money and instead should go towards our welfare programs and education and health systems. We should be giving money to the programs that help people instead to the people because people can waste the moeney or even have accidents such as this one and waste a lot of money.
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