Follow-up: Being Dead Ruins Your Life

On February 19, I wrote about the plight of Laura Todd of Nashville, Tennessee. It seems that another woman died in Florida eight years ago, and someone entered Laura's Social Security Number into the death record. The assumption is that it was a simple clerical error. Laura Todd has had problems ever since. You can read that article at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2008/02/being-dead-ruin.html.

MSNBC now says that the problem is much bigger than what I had reported.

It seems that thousands of U.S. citizens have been wrongfully declared dead, due to an average of 35 data input errors per day by the Social Security Administration (SSA). Many other agencies rely on the data provided by the SSA, such as the IRS. People who have been wrongfully declared dead face many problems, such as rejection of tax returns, cancellation of health insurance, and closure of bank accounts. The article states, "Input of an erroneous death entry can lead to benefit termination and result in financial hardship for a beneficiary."

Sadly, getting such an error corrected is very difficult. The hapless victim suffers needlessly because of government red tape. It seems far easier to declare a person's death than to correct the mistake. You can read more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23378093.

Comments

[Happy Dae]

Like any source of genealogical information, the experienced genealogist will use the Social Security Death Index and then verify the data with other sources. Perhaps someone could create a SNOPES.com for Social Security Deaths? Sounds like a fulltime occupation for several people.

Happy Dae.
http://www.ShoeStringGenealogy.com

[Bridget]

The Social Security Administration makes other mistakes. They entered my aunt's date of death as two days before she actually died. Her insurance companies then refused to pay the medical bills from her last two days in the hospital, "because she had already died". Getting this corrected at Social Security took two visits, both with long waits, in which I provided the proof of her actual date of death. (They lost the death certificate after my first visit.) Many months later, the doctors and hospitals could finally get the insurance money they were entitled to.

[MWSloan]

ONE number makes a BIG difference! We KNEW something was WRONG when the funeral home for which I worked as receptionist/insurance clerk started getting phone calls for price quotes for paint and dent repair! The new phone directory in the small town included numbers for several communities. The repair service's exchange number was transposed in the book. We got their calls. Numerous calls in two days, chuckles and surprised callers later, the phone company ferrated out the problem. Their solution was to print and distribute correction stickers for customers to cover the error.
Of course, we still got the calls until the stickers got mailed out and applied. The owner of the mortuary took to heart what had happened with the phone book, saying at one point that he knew not all of those stickers were going to be applied, so for us not to be shocked when we got another "body work" call. At the same time, he started having us make copies of social security cards or other documentation of critical numbers from the families we served. Previously, we had merely recorded the data from the card. When we sent notice of a death to the SSA, we sent a copy of the SS card(or whatever source it was)as verification of the number.
IMHO, however, there is no excuse for incorrect data being submitted, period.

[Israel]

Here in Israel, I just learned that the largest pension fund won't process a pension claim based on a self-reported bank account number. You have to give them a copy of one of your checks. Only then will they trust that they have the right account number and will begin making monthly payments. They seem to assume that the citizens are as sloppy as they themselves.

[John]

Couple of comments:

Any insurance company that doesn't use a death certificate when presented as proof of death but instead uses the data in death master file instead needs to be taken to your state insurance administrator because that's just plain stupid. Primary proof of death should supercede any other data source. There was no need for you to correct the DMF except sheer laziness on their part. For the most part, Social Security doesn't care about the day of death unless it's on the 1st of the month, so for their purposes, the day usually doesn't matter. SSA cares about death in order to stop payments to the dead, so being off a day or 2 isn't a concern most of the time.

I know that mess-ups happen in the SSA office, but the reality is a number of these problems occur because the report of death that comes in is incorrect by a day or 2; a family member says someone died Tuesday when they really died Wednesday, a funeral home sending in a report with a typo (typos happen everywhere, not just at the social security office) and even mistakes in a state report of death or the SSN reported on the death certificate for the deceased isn't the SSN for the deceased.

Not making excuses, because if this happened to me it'd really make me angry but 2.5 million people die in the US annually, almost 6,900 per day. So even if SSA makes all of the mistakes (all data that they get is presumed accurate) it seems that SSA gets 99.5% of the death inputs processed correctly.

And if the DMF were only used to halt SSA payments, there'd be much less of a probelm. But because others use the data for their own business purposes, the errors that might be benign within SSA have a real impact outside of SSA. That .5% error rate has repercussions because the errors get propagated so widely.

Given the impact of an erroneous report of death, the real problem is the use of the death master file by others who do not have to take the time to verify that the data is right and who put the burden on fixing the problem on the poor consumer. A citizen-centric solution would be to require any and all companies using the DMF to terminate a benefit or service or to annotate their records to notify consumers by letter that they plan to terminate their (fill in the blank) because they have been reported dead, make the company wait 30 days before they can take that action and give the consumer time to stop the erroneous action from taking place. (I wonder just how many letters a person might get, from insurance companies, credit bureaus, credit card companies and more.)

I'd include credit bureaus in this as well; before annotating someones credit report as dead, annotate them as "presumed dead using the DMF pending verification" and give the consumer time to rebut the mistake before all these bad actions take effect.

If someone is really dead, the letters won't have any real effect except making perhaps the estat's job easier in dealing with any of the deceased creditors. But if they are not, they have a window to stop bad things from happening and messing up their lives.

I'd use the FTC as the central contact point for the citizen to provide proof that they are in fact alive and have the FTC work with SSA and private industry in handling these erroneous death cases.

The current process tilts towards business too much and ignores the impact on the citizen/consumer entirely.