A new bill recently reintroduced in Congress would require government agencies to regularly verify whether older Social Security recipients are still alive.
If passed, the bill introduced by Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL)—the Valid Benefits Act—would have federal agencies and departments check every six months to see whether adults ages 105 or older are deceased. It would apply to Social Security as well as Medicare and other federal health and retirement benefits.
More than 10,000 Americans are believed to be 105 or older, according to 2020 U.S. Census data.
“No American who has paid into Social Security and Medicare should see their benefits compromised by scam artists or incompetent bureaucrats,” Steube said in a May 29 statement.
The bill, first proposed by Rep. Steube in 2019, comes after several months of allegations by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that Social Security is losing money to fraud and mismanagement. A DOGE engineer told Fox News in March that 40% of calls made to the Social Security Administration to change direct deposit information come from fraudsters, a statistic that has been repeated by Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance.
Musk and President Donald Trump have also asserted that millions of dead people are still receiving Social Security benefits, though the Social Security Administration says those claims are based on a misinterpretation of data.
“It shouldn’t have required DOGE examining the rolls to ensure 12 million Americans listed as 120 years old or more were finally properly recorded as deceased,” Steube said. “With millions of seniors relying on Social Security and Medicare and our national debt approaching $37 trillion, it is important to make sure every dollar is spent the right way with no room for malfeasance or error. That is why we must protect our retirement programs and beneficiaries by requiring eligibility verification for individuals who are 105 years and older.”
In March, the Social Security Administration said more than three million deaths are reported to the agency each year, and of those, less than one-third of 1% are erroneously reported deaths that need to be corrected.
The agency receives reports of deaths from the States as well as family members, funeral homes, other federal agencies and financial institutions. It then updates the Death Master File accordingly.
The Death Master File is also used by life insurance and annuity companies to determine whether policyholders are still alive.
The Social Security Administration has said that erroneous reports of deaths can have devastating consequences for the individual, their spouse and any dependent children. Stopping benefits, even for the short term, can cause financial hardship until fixed, and the process to prove a death has been misreported can seem long and challenging for many families.
Other DOGE-related changes have resulted in slowdowns at the Social Security Administration. According to internal documents obtained by NextGov, anti-fraud checks for benefits claims made over the phone that were implemented in April have found that only two benefit claims out of over 110,000 had a high probability of being fraudulent.
The anti-fraud checks slowed retirement claims processing by 25%, though, and the agency is currently dealing with a backlog of 140,000 unprocessed retirement claims that are over 60 days old.
SEE ALSO:
• Senate Confirms Bisignano to Lead Social Security in Party Line Vote
• Social Security Administration Cutting 7,000 Jobs in DOGE-Initiated Restructuring
• Social Security Issues: Flurry of Changes Sparks Confusion
Corey Dahl is assistant editor with PropertyCasualty360.com. Previously, Corey was the editor of Colorado Builder magazine andS enior Manager of Content Strategy & Development at Charles Schwab.