3. More Grateful Dead
In the first decade of the 21st century, the federal government had paid nearly $1 billion in disability and retirement to at least 250,000 retired federal employees. And you might think, ‘that’s great, they earned it for their hard work and years of service,’ there’s one slight problem, they are all DEAD! That’s right, an investigation in 2010 found that the Office of Personnel Management has been paying out benefits to dead Federal employees for years.
How is this possible? A report found that the OPM was ‘doing a poor job of tracking potential cheats’. One prime example is a deceased annuitant’s son who continued receiving federal benefits until 2008, around $515,000, 37 years after his father’s death. And the agency only discovered this after the son had passed away. They never got a cent back.
