Sometimes, it pays to be dead

The U.S. government’s system for tracking deaths — and cutting off benefit payments to the deceased — has problems. Clerical errors such as typos and transposed Social Security numbers can result in living people being counted as ”dead” and dead people counted as living. One major problem is that not all federal agencies are allowed to use the full Death Master File, a running — though flawed — list of the nation’s dead. Read related article.