WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 (UPI) -- Tens of thousands of stimulus checks were mailed in error to people who were dead or jailed, a U.S. government office reported.
About 89,000 checks of $250 each were sent mistakenly through the Obama administration's stimulus program, the Washington Post reported Thursday, citing the Social Security Office of Inspector General.
Altogether, the Social Security Administration distributed about $13 billion to 52 million eligible beneficiaries under the economic recovery program, which cost $814 billion. Most of the payments were issued properly, but the SSA failed to check all payment records or did not know that beneficiaries had died, the report found.
Although the SSA lacks the authority to recoup most of the money, the report estimates that slightly more than half of the payments have been returned.
About 71,600 recipients were dead before the SSA certified their payments, receiving a total of $18 million, the report said. Some 17,300 prison inmates received $4.3 million.
Most of the inmates were eligible to receive checks because the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act only prohibited payments to people incarcerated in the three months before it passed, which was November 2008 to January 2009.
