WSMV in Nashville has a story about a woman who has been declared dead on and off for the last 8 years. But it isn’t doctors who are making the declarations. It’s the U.S. government in the form of the Social Security Administration. In fact, a government audit found that some 23,000 people had been declared “un-dead” over the last 2 years. This creates a mess for the people this happens to. Not only do they have to file the paperwork to reverse what is a clerical error, but they have to have the error fixed in other governemnt agencies such as the IRS. If you’ve been declared dead, you cannot get a tax refund or the upcoming rebate checks. Since the SSA releases (or sells) all their information about people they have declared deceased (i.e. to Ancestry.com), there is now the possibility for identity theft.
Dying is truly a bad thing…even when you’re not really dead.