Lisa Rein, Alice Crites, and Jennifer Jenkins of The Washington Post have written an excellent exposé of Social Security’s treatment of the disabled and poor, including its use of archaic job-availability lists to deny benefits to obviously terribly disabled people and its imposition of astronomical penalties on a range of people, many poor or disabled, for spending checks mistakenly sent them by Social Security — checks that were often unidentified as coming from Social Security or checks the recipients thought were their rightful benefits for the keeping. The reporters’ outstanding work has received the attention of members of the Senate who are now investigating. The Board of Editors of the Washington Post has also joined the chorus for reform.
But the Post is years late in writing about Social Security’s horrific treatment of the public. Worse, they are missing the System’s far more egregious financial malfeasance — the huge fraud Social Security has committed and continues to commit against 13,000 plus widow(er)s who collectively have been swindled out of $130 million. These aren’t my figures. They are those of Social Security’s own Inspector General.
It’s hard to understand how the Post and other major media have missed Social Security’s pervasive misconduct. I and others have written about the problems for years. Here’s my column from May 2022 entitled, Is Social Security the Biggest Perpetrator of Social Security Fraud? It links to a 2015 column…
