Dead, Jailed People Get $22 Mil in Stimulus Checks

A highly-touted presidential order to stop federal agencies from sending taxpayer dollars to dead and incarcerated people hasn’t kicked in because the government sent them more than $22 million last year as part of Obama’s disastrous stimulus program.

To be fair, the executive order was officially issued earlier this year in response to rampant waste, fraud and abuse in the government’s system of issuing Social Security benefit payments. President Obama’s order commands federal agencies to create a “Do Not Pay List” to protect taxpayer resources and stem abuse. When data reveals that a recipient of a federal payment is ineligible for it, “subsequent payment to that recipient is unacceptable,” the president said.

In 2009 alone, the government sent nearly 90,000 checks of $250 each to inmates and people who had been dead for years, according to the findings of a Social Security Inspector General probe. More than 70,000 of the recipients were dead before the agency approved the payments of about $18 million and around 17,000 jailed criminals got $4.3 million, the inspector general says in a recently issued report.

It gets better. Because the money came from Obama’s fraud-infested $787 billion stimulus the government can’t recover a chunk of the cash. That’s because the Recovery Act doesn’t give the Treasury Department or the Social Security Administration the authority to reclaim erroneous payments made through electronic funds transfers to deceased beneficiaries.

This simply marks the latest of many examples of waste in the president’s stimulus program, which has failed miserably to fulfill his promise of jumpstarting the economy and putting Americans back to work. Tens of billions of dollars have been unscrupulously spent on things like fraudulent “weatherization” for low-income houses, turtle crossings, ant research and a number of other laughable projects that have been documented by Judicial Watch. Check out a few examples by clicking here, here and here.