Zombie Pension paid to Dead Man for 20 years by Andrew Walden

Millions worth of taxpayer dollars have been shelled out in the form of payments and benefits to people who aren’t even alive, and few agencies are taking advantage of a low-to-no-cost system that could stop those over-payments sooner.

From pensions to property tax exemptions, even parking placards, payments and benefits that should stop when someone passes away are often passing on to the living….

the state retirement system has been crosschecking state death records monthly since December 2014, with the help of the Department of Health’s vital statistics branch Office of Health Status Monitoring through something they call “death matching.”

We asked what the DOH found when matching up deceased records with the ERS recipient list.

“Initially we found a lot of deaths that we had (still receiving checks),” said state registrar Alvin Onaka, “but on average now we’re finding 10 deaths per month.”

That’s 10 per month that weren’t previously reported to the pension fund by the family or survivors, out of the 1,400 or so retirees who pass away in Hawaii each year. ERS pegs about 150 cases that add up to the half-million overpaid.

“It could be anywhere between a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars,” Machida said….

Last year, the FBI and state Labor Department, using a different approach, caught and prosecuted two people who for years collected hundreds of thousands of their dead parents’ payments: Lynsie Katherine Williams for more than $400,000 of her dad’s workers’ compensation payments, and Steven Splater for more than $200,000 of his mom’s disability checks. They both did time in federal prison.

The Department of Health ran its death match of the state’s retiree health system or “EUTF” and flagged a name that had passed 20 years ago and was still getting benefits. The state attorney general’s office says they have no active criminal case for that one….

In the past couple of years, two were found guilty of theft after state prosecutions for taking thousands of dollars’ worth of dead people’s continuing pension payments: Cynthia Namaka for more than $3,000, and Harold Robertson for more than $5,000. They each had to pay restitution and do community service for punishment….

Sometimes it’s not money out, but too little money being billed to taxpayers who owe, that’s costing the government.

“We worked with real property tax. We started with City and County of Honolulu, and I think on our first run of those who were claiming 65-year-old-and-over exemptions, we found 4,000 of their enrollees had expired.”

”One of our early adopters was the people who issue the (disabled parking) placards,” Onaka added. “They submitted a list and we were able to provide them with those who should not be using those placards because they were dead (and the relatives didn’t turn them back in).”

PDF: ERS pension overpayments to the deceased

Read … State matching program that could catch payments to the dead rarely used

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