WASHINGTON — They’ve made grave errors.
The Social Security Administration must do more to prevent benefit checks from going to dead people and Congress should step up to pass safeguards to protect taxpayer dollars from fraud, according to one GOP senator known for cracking down on pork barrel spending.
“The time for the catch-me-if-you-can Social Security fraudsters must come to an end,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) wrote in a letter to SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano on Tuesday.
“I would ask that you continue doing everything in your administrative powers to stop sending checks to dead people.”
The Social Security Administration has been under the microscope for past payments to the deceased that their loved ones pocket for years undetected, with one watchdog review uncovering over $186 million worth of payments made to dead people.
The Iowa Republican urged the SSA to be more proactive about preventing the theft of Social Security checks in the first place, instead of just catching the hoodwinkers decades later.
Ernst cited examples where authorities eventually discovered that dead people were still getting checks, which were often taken by their relatives.
In one instance, Canadian national Ellis Kingsep allegedly cashed in some $420,000 worth of checks for his mom between 1995 and 2023, when she would’ve been 103 years old. The feds later caught Kingsep with books on how to make fake IDS and photocopies of his mother’s signature.
Another example was California man Donald Felix Zampach, who is accused of keeping his mother’s death under wraps for over three decades and stealing over $800,000.
Last month, Josephine Guinauli Aquino of San Diego pleaded guilty to concealing her father-in-law’s 2019 death and reaping over $175,000 in cash, forging at least 150 bank checks in the process.
The most recent successful Social Security-related fraud prosecution was Afshin Setoodeh, whose mom left the country in 2019 and died in 2022. Setoodeh neglected to report his mother’s decision to leave the US and took the checks, padding his pockets with some $55,000.
While estimating the full scope of Social Security fraud is tricky, a 2023 study by the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General found that at least $186 million worth of payments erroneously went out over a period of multiple years to “payees who may not have been using the funds for beneficiaries’ needs.”
The study looked at 14,877 misuse accusations the SSA had during a multi-year period, including fraud cases that spanned numerous years.
It also found that “SSA did not properly or timely investigate 12,050 allegations.”
Tackling fraudulent payments at SSA was a high priority for the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) former leader, Elon Musk.
Musk bragged this year that his DOGE team uncovered evidence that “tens of millions” of dead people over 100 years old were marked “alive” in Social Security’s system. While that number turned out not to be the number of bad checks going out, a 2024 watchdog report found that roughly $71.8 billion of the nearly $8.6 trillion in payments made were “improper.”
“We all know the Christmas story that includes the Ghost of Christmas Past,” Ernst, who leads the Senate DOGE Caucus, said in a Christmas-themed statement to The Post.
“Most Americans would prefer the story remain fictitious and not have millions of their tax dollars paying actual ghosts. We need to stop paying dead people — full stop.”
Ernst, who is retiring at the end of her term in early 2027, helped pass the “Stopping Improper Payments to Deceased People Act,” which took effect in 2020 to ensure cross-agency information sharing of deceased people.
But more needs to be done. She co-sponsored the Ending Improper Payments to Deceased People Act, which cleared the Senate but not the House, and would mandate SSA share death records with the Treasury Department for its Do Not Pay working system.
Congress had given the Treasury Department access to SSA’s Full Death Master File in 2023, and the department stymied $31 million in fraud and improper payments as a result, the Biden administration announced.
Over $94 million had been spent on Obamacare payments to households where a dead person was enrolled, a General Accountability Office report earlier this month found.
Those fraudulent payments involved individuals using dead people’s Social Security numbers and other names to reap the Obamacare benefits.
The Post contacted the SSA for comment.
