- The Trump administration claimed the Social Security Administration gives payments to dead people.
- An SSA audit published in November 2021 revealed $298 million paid to 24,000 dead Americans.
- That’s fewer deceased recipients than the “tens of millions” of people the administration suspected.
The Trump administration is searching for fraud in the Social Security Administration for what it believes are payments to dead Americans, but SSA audits reveal this isn’t happening as frequently as the administration said.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a Fox News interview that President Donald Trump has instructed Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to find fraud within the SSA. She added that they suspect there are “tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments.”
While SSA audits over the past few years have found that a few thousand dead Americans have received Social Security payments, it was nowhere near as widespread. Business Insider analyzed three recent audits by the Office of the Inspector General at the Social Security Administration conducted since 2021. These determined that errors such as overpaying beneficiaries and paying dead Americans have amounted to billions in losses, though these are under 1% of total SSA benefits payouts.
The Social Security Administration did not respond to a request for comment.
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SSA audits reveal small overpayments with recommendations to fix those
A November 2021 audit by the Office of the Inspector General at the Social Security Administration found that the agency paid about $298 million to 24,000 people after their deaths despite their accounts being flagged for suspended payments through December 2019, far below the tens of millions posited by Leavitt. The audit traced this error to faults in policy and technician errors.
The SSA sometimes sends beneficiaries either too large or too small sums, though these improper payments are a small fraction of total payments.
A July 2024 report from the OIG determined that between fiscal year 2015 and 2022, only about 0.84% of the Social Security Administration’s payouts were deemed improper. However, over that period, SSA distributed a whopping nearly $8.6 trillion in benefits, meaning even that small percentage of improper payments added up to $71.8 billion.
“Even the slightest error in the overall payment process can result in billions of dollars in improper payments,” the audit said, noting that improper payments occur due to infrequently updated SSA records or beneficiaries’ failure to report information.
Those improper payments are often clawed back after SSA identifies them. The audit said that at the end of fiscal year 2023, the SSA recovered over $4.9 billion in overpayments, though its uncollected overpayment balance sat at $23 billion.
The OIG has provided various recommendations for amending some improper payment issues, such as creating reports to identify cases of people who have died and establishing automation and data analytics procedures to better identify improper payments.
In a separate July 2023 audit, about 18.9 million people born in 1920 or before held Social Security numbers but no death records in SSA files, a concern Musk raised in a post on X. But the overwhelming majority of those aren’t receiving benefits: The audit said that 44,000 of these people received SSA payments at the time of the review. The Census Bureau estimates there are over 100,000 centenarians in the US as of 2024.
After Musk said during a press conference in the Oval Office on February 11 that he and his team found “people in there that are 150 years old,” PolitiFact reported that some people who have closely worked with the SSA suspected the reason for that anomaly in the records was that, in some coding systems, the absence of a birthdate is coded to 1875, the year a conference for determining international standards occurred.
On Monday, Michelle King, the SSA’s acting commissioner who worked at the agency for over 30 years, stepped down after DOGE inquired about accessing sensitive SSA information containing Americans’ personal details. King was replaced by Leland Dudek, who manages the SSA’s anti-fraud office.
“President Trump has nominated the highly qualified and talented Frank Bisignano to lead the Social Security Administration, and we expect him to be swiftly confirmed in the coming weeks,” Harrison Fields, principal deputy press secretary, said in a statement.
