The Washington Free Beacon is reporting a breaking story that will have every American taxpayer furious. The Social Security Administration conducted a routine audit and discovered it paid $1 billion in benefits to individuals who did not have a Social Security Number (SSN).
The agency’s inspector general found errors in the government’s documentation for representative payees. There are individuals who receive retirement or disability payments on behalf of another person who is incapable of managing the benefits themselves. The audit found thousands of cases where there was no SSN on file.
Over the last decade, the agency paid $1 billion to 22,426 representative payees who “did not have an SSN, and SSA had not followed its policy to retain the paper application.”
“Furthermore, unless it takes corrective action, we estimate SSA will pay about $182.5 million in benefits, annually, to representative payees who do not have an SSN or paper application supporting their selection,” the inspector general said.
The inspector general also discovered the agency paid $853.1 million in benefits since 2004 to individuals who had been fired as representative payees by the agency.
It gets worse – the inspector general said the fraud occurred because the agency does not keep paper applications supporting an individual’s case to receive benefits on behalf of another and did not update its system if their status was terminated.
Are you fricking kidding me? What the hell is going on here.
But it gets worse…
Government benefits – taxpayer money – are also going to illegal aliens through the representative payee system. 17 percent of representative payees did not have an SSN recorded because they were undocumented noncitizens, the inspector general said.
Stop the presses. 17% of the people fraudulently receiving taxpayer money are illegal aliens? And we allow this?
Apparently, we do. Because illegal aliens without SSNs are allowed to receive benefits from the government when acting as representatives for their minor children.
“Representative payees play a significant role in many beneficiaries’ lives,” the SSA said. “We have approximately 5.7 million representative payees managing annual benefits for approximately 8 million beneficiaries. When appointing representative payees, we adhere to guidance in the Social Security Act (the Act).”
“Specific to this audit, the Act permits us to appoint, in certain circumstances, an undocumented alien, or applicant who resides outside the United States without a Social Security number (SSN) to serve as payee,” the agency said. “Specifically, the Act states we should verify a person’s SSN (or employer identification number) in our investigation of the payee applicant. However, the Act does not state that the applicant must have an SSN to serve as a payee.”
And there it is. That’s how organized gangs of illegal aliens take your money. Because we fricking allow them to.
This has to stop – or every American will simply stop working too and collect benefits. Why should I work when they don’t have to and they make just as much money, if not more than hard working Americans?
