In many parts of Mexico, today is the official celebration of Día de los Muertos – or Day of the Dead. That seems awfully fitting since, just this week, Sen.Tom Coburn (R-OK) published a report on his web site that alleges that well more than $1 billion of your tax dollars has been given to dead people over the last ten years. It’s even scarier when you see it written out: $1,000,000,0000.
The biggest money-waster? Surprisingly, the Farm Services Agency of the Department of Agriculture. According to the report, in just seven years, the federal government paid out more than $1 billion to nearly 173,000 dead farmers. That’s a lot of corn, my friends.
While some farms may continue to receive payments for two years after the death of the principal in certain circumstances, more than 40% of the payments went to those that had
died three or more years ago. About half of that went to those who had died seven or more years ago.
And remember those $250 stimulus checks? An investigation found that $18 million of those checks were sent to 71,688 deceased individuals. While some percentage of those checks were mailed out because SSA had not been informed that the taxpayers had died, an alarming number of the beneficiaries were actually accurately reported as deceased. In fact, in 2008, SSA paid deceased beneficiaries a whopping $40.3 million in benefits even after being notified of those deaths.
The beleaguered Department of Housing and Urban Development paid out more than $15.2 million in to households in 2008 to program households containing at least one deceased tenant. This included $7 million sent to single-member households whose only “family” was a deceased individual.
Scary, huh? The report goes on to cite examples of poor oversight and waste in other programs, including Medicare and Medicaid.
You can read the entire report here (downloads as a pdf).
It’s not a pretty picture. On some level, it’s to be expected. These agencies are huge and there are bound to be examples of waste and fraud – both on the agency and consumer ends. But seeing it lumped together like that is kind of sobering, especially in this economy when those millions of dollars could be put to the good use. Just think of how heart warming it would be to read a report about all of the wonderful ways our tax dollars are being used instead of a litany of “I see dead people.”
This is a very scary issue, but I question the Senator’s motives in releasing the information today (election day). While very disturbing, this is not a new problem, it is one which was created by both parties over a long period of time. Remember Republicans controled the admininstration (and thus the oversight of these programs) in eight of the last 10 years.
A billion dollars is a lot of money to waste, but this is a problem that niether party has any credibility saying that they are willing, or able, to solve.
I always question a politician’s motives when these kinds of reports are released. The underlying data, however, can’t be ignored. It *is* scary!