Match of Treasury Death Information Against Social Security Administration Records
- Audit report number
- A-06-18-50568
- Management challenge
- Improve the Prevention, Detection, and Recovery of Improper Payments
- Full report
- /~assets/audits/full/a-06-18-50568.pdf
- Summary report
- /~assets/audits/summary/a-06-18-50568-summary.pdf
Our objective was to determine the appropriateness of payments the Social Security Administration (SSA) issued to beneficiaries who were deceased according to Department of the Treasury (Treasury) data.
SSA administers the Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs under Titles II and XVI of the Social Security Act, respectively. Under both programs, payments should terminate when a beneficiary dies.
We obtained data from Treasury’s Department of Fiscal Services that identified death information it received while processing non-SSA Federal benefit payments from January 2, 2015 through May 4, 2017. We matched the data against SSA payment records and identified beneficiaries in current payment status whose personally identifiable information matched that of individuals for whom dates of death were listed in the Treasury data.
