Social Security mailed 3900 stimulus checks of $250 to prisoners. Unfortunately, 2200 got entitled to them because of the way the law was written. They were eligible for the checks because they were not in jail during the three months prior to the enactment of the stimulus package. Social Security correctly sent the prisoners $250.
The media does not seem to be in the least concerned that 2200 prisoners legally received the stimulus checks because the law was poorly written.
Why didn’t Congress exclude them from receiving the checks if they were in jail at the time the checks were mailed?
All the attention has been focused on the 1700 prisoners that received the checks that were not eligible to them. They received the checks because Social Security was not aware they were prisoners. Most of the checks were returned by the prison facilities upon receipt.
The government did not lose $425,000 as the media has suggested.
Social Security will take aggressive action to get ALL the money back that was erroneously mailed and not returned. I would bet at the time I am writing this that there are less than 500 outstanding payments.
I think that Social Security did an awesome job minimizing the error rate in this area. Incidentally, the error rate involving prisoners to the entire group was .003%.
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