At least $37 million in bogus payments were made to veterans who were dead, according to an audit released by the Social Security inspector general, The Washington Times reported over the weekend.
Investigators compared the records of the Department of Veterans Affairs to those receiving Social Security and discovered that nearly 4,000 people who were listed as dead by the VA were still getting their regular payments.
Some of those people who were recorded as dead, it turns out, were actually still alive. Others, however, were indeed deceased but continued receiving their checks anyway.
One such glaring example was a California man who passed away in 2008 but continued receiving payments, a total of some $160,000, until March of this year, the NewBostonPost reported.
At that point, the inspector general received a report from the State Department that the veteran had died in Thailand almost a decade before.
The report
