Page 16 - IAV Digital Magazine #497

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Dallas Woman Got $1,200 From Uncle Sam Months After She Died; Check Was Even Marked ‘Decd’
WASHINGTON — However many $1,200 stimulus checks have gone out to dead people in the last month, the White House insists it’s a “tiny” problem, and probably just one of those things because the bureaucracy hadn’t caught wind of the tax- payers’ deaths
yet.
But the IRS knew full well that this particular 93- year-old from suburban Dallas was deceased when it cut her check.
Next to her name, the check says “decd.”
“Honestly, I think
my grandmother would think this was funny as hell. I think she would be laughing and she would cash the stupid thing. She’d say, ‘Well, I’ll go buy some groceries with it.’ She was unbe- lievably practical,” said grandson Philip Ray, a lawyer in Frisco. “This is just an
unbelievable level of incompetency.”
The federal gov- ernment hasn’t said how many such snafus have occurred. Officials at the Treasury Department and the IRS, which is part of Treasury, didn’t respond to queries about the steps taken to ensure that peo- ple listed in its database as deceased would- n’t get a check.
Anecdotes about recently departed loved ones who received post- mortem stimulus checks have bounced around social media for two weeks. A congressman from Kentucky, Rep. Thomas Massie, revealed two weeks ago that the late father of a friend had received a check. Massie called the error
“insane, but just the tip of the ice- berg.”
President Donald Trump down- played such prob- lems at a White House briefing two days later.
“We sent out 80 million deposits, and less than 1% had even little problems,” he said April 17. “A couple had minor glitches, but it’s substantially less than 1%. So out of 80 million deposits, less than 1%. And that gets corrected immediately.”
When a Dallas Morning
News reporter pointed out that 1% of 80 million is 800,000, which could represent tens of millions of dollars, Trump responded: “The snafus are very minor ... and any mistake that was
made, they’ve been caught. And it’s less than 1%. That’s a very good percentage ... for govern- ment.”
The government will recover money sent to deceased people, he added: “We'll get that back. Everything, we're going to get back. But it's a tiny amount.”
Ray asked that his grandmother remain anony- mous. His mom believes in the adage that a per- son’s name should appear in a newspaper only when they’re born and when they die. The obituary was published four months ago, after her death on Dec. 17.
So let’s call her Jane Doe.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine