I-Team: Grave Mistakes

WASHINGTON - The Social Security Administration each month falsely reports that nearly 1,200 living Americans have died.

In the last 10 years, 181 living Tri-State residents have been erroneously listed as dead.

These clerical errors, found in a federal database ominously titled the "Death Master File," might be darkly humorous -- evoking Mark Twain's famous quip that death reports can be greatly exaggerated -- were not the consequences so severe.

"It has just been one thing right after another since I found out that I was dead," said an unsmiling Judy C. Rivers, 58, of Jasper, Ala. "Right now, I am still looking for a job. I hate to give out my Social Security number because I know exactly what is going to happen."

Dozens of times, Rivers has been told that her Social Security number is inactive because she's deceased. Police detained her for several hours last year under suspicion of identity fraud when she tried to use her debit card at a local Walmart. She's been denied college aid and home-refinance loans, been refused job interviews because of irregularities in her file and been rejected 14 times for credit cards.

"All of them said basically the same thing: 'The Social Security number cannot be confirmed' or 'Social Security number deactivated due to death,' " Rivers said.

The Social Security Administration has denied that it was the source of the error in Rivers' records and gave her letters certifying that she is alive and that her Social Security account is active.

"We make it clear that our death records are not perfect and may be incomplete or, rarely, include information about individuals who are alive," said Social Security Administration spokesman Mark Hinkle.

Scripps Howard News Service obtained three copies of the federal death file -- widely available to anyone on the Internet -- from 1998, 2008 and 2011. By comparing the files, Scripps easily identified 31,931 living Americans who were listed as deceased in 1998 or 2008 but were later taken off the death list after the Social Security Administration realized the errors.

The Death Master File was created in 1980 at the request of U.S. business interests to prevent consumer fraud. The massive database of nearly 90 million deceased Americans is widely distributed throughout government and among credit, banking and other private business groups.

The file is used to allocate federal benefits like Social Security and Medicare and to determine eligibility for bank loans, credit cards and insurance coverage. Employers looking for irregularities in a prospective employee's background access the Death Master File as part of routine background checks.

The United Network for Organ Sharing -- a private, nonprofit organization that manages the U.S. organ-transplant system under a contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- even uses the DMF to determine eligibility of organ-transplant candidates.

Hinkle said about one in every 200 entries the Social Security Administration makes to the Death Master File is false because of "inadvertent keying errors" by federal workers. That means 14,000 people are wrongly listed as deceased among the approximately 2.7 million deaths reported annually, Hinkle said.

"Living individuals are sometimes included in the DMF; however, it is a very small percentage," Hinkle said.
Among them was Leonard Perkins, 76, of Washington, D.C., who was put on the Death Master File after he was falsely reported to have died on Feb. 15, 2002.

"Some lady at Social Security must have put in something wrong and listed him as deceased. They sent me a letter of condolence," said Harriett Perkins, Leonard's wife. "I became a widow real fast."

Their retirement benefits were disrupted for several weeks. "Neither of us had a check for a while until they cleared it up," she said.

Although Perkins' name was on the death list from 2002 through at least 2008, the family's benefits were restored within two months of discovery of the mistake.

Some Americans don't know they've been reported dead by their government.

"Obviously, I'm still here," said William Weems, 94, of Alexandria, Va., after learning from a Scripps reporter that the Social Security Administration recorded that he died on March 17, 2008. "That was the date of my wife's death."

But others faced significant consequences that lasted many years.

"I couldn't get a mortgage because, well, dead people can't get mortgages," said Laura Todd, 57, of Nashville, Tenn., who was put on the list in 1999, taken off and inexplicably put back on a few years later.

From 1999 through 2008, Todd suffered cancellation of her medical disability payments, two refusals by the Internal Revenue Service for her federal income tax refunds, cancellation of her credit cards and freezes placed upon her bank accounts. A family member even called Todd to warn that a record of her death was posted on a genealogy website.

"I spent almost 10 years trying to straighten this all out. No one ever sent me