Tax Dollars at Work: Biden Admin Has Paid Dead People Nearly a Billion Dollars – By Alec Schemmel (Washington Free Beacon) / June 13, 2023
‘While on track to waste $1 trillion of your taxes, they want to tax you even more,’ watchdog group says
The Biden administration in 2021 and 2022 paid dead people almost a billion dollars in improper payments, a new report shows, underscoring the extreme largesse of mistaken and overpaid funds that plague the federal government.
Since taking office in 2021, the Biden administration has wasted at least $528 billion in improper payments to people who shouldn’t have received them, according to an analysis from fiscal watchdog group OpenTheBooks. More than $974 million of those payments went to dead people, according to the report. In one case, a Missouri man “collected $200,000 in checks for his dead mother for 26 years before the government found out, while a Michigan man collected $500,000 under the name of a dead relative,” the report notes. Federal programs ripe with improper payments include Medicaid, Medicare, and the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program.
While improper payments are nothing new, the Biden administration has failed at an unprecedented level. The $281 billion in improper payments seen during fiscal year 2021 is an all-time high, according to OpenTheBooks, while the $247 billion seen during fiscal year 2022 is “more than every other previous year.” The administration could have greenlit even more improper payments in 2022, but in many cases, improper payments during that year decreased only because “federal agencies lowered or removed spending requirements,” the report says.
