The Treasury Department is sending thousands of stimulus checks to dead people — even those who were never part of the system.
Sending stimulus checks to dead people
As part of the stimulus deal, people on Social Security get a $250 bonus (for being old, still driving a Buick or some other reason).
The Treasury Department is currently cranking out the checks and sending them out — and thousands are going to people who are no longer with us and who were never a part of the Social Security system.
From the Fox affiliate in New York:
This week, thousands of people are getting stimulus checks in the mail. The problem is that a lot of them are dead. A Long Island woman was shocked when she checked the mail and received a letter from the U.S. Treasury — but it wasn’t for her.
Antoniette Santopadre of Valley Stream was expecting a $250 stimulus check. But when her son finally opened it, they saw that the check was made out to her father, Romolo Romonini, who died in Italy 34 years ago. He’d been a U.S. citizen when he left for Italy in 1933, but only returned to the United Stated for a seven-month visit in 1969.
The Santopadres are not alone. The Social Security Administration, which sent out 52 million checks, says that some of those checks mistakenly went to dead people because the agency had no record of their death. That amounts to between 8,000 and 10,000 checks for millions of dollars.
The feds blame a rushed schedule, because all the checks have to be cut by June. The strange this is, some of the checks were made out to people — like Romonini — who were never even part of the Social Security system.
Maybe this is being run like the AIG bailout — did Chris Dodd unkowingly sneak in an amendment to give bonus checks to dead people at the urging of the administration?
And it’s got to make you wonder: How many living people who aren’t part of the Social Security system will be also be getting checks?
