One of the great advantages of living in the United States is that you can collect Social Security when you become a senior citizen. It doesn’t matter if you have more or less money in the benefit, what matters is that you can somehow manage to live and pay all your expenses. These benefits are individual and the money is for use by the retired person. Another person cannot make use of these taxes. Also, when someone dies, the Social Security Administration must receive this notice to stop sending the payment.
In this case, the woman we are talking about did not do the latter. Therefore, she did not notify the Social Security Administration that her father had died. Since her father was collecting a benefit, he continued to receive it in his bank account even though he was dead. She took advantage of the situation and used her dead father’s benefit money to travel and even buy drugs.
She illegally collected Social Security for more than 15 years
This woman began collecting Social Security from her dead father in 2005. As a result, she went on to receive more than 180 monthly retirement benefit payments. This brings the total money she illegally received to $254,115.75. One of the first things she spent the stolen SSA money on was a trip to Las Vegas.
And that’s not the end of this woman’s adventure. According to Sacbee, another expense she made shortly after she began collecting Social Security from her father was buying methamphetamine. The extent of these subsequent expenditures is unknown, but the rest of the money is estimated to have been spent on similar things.
The sentence
The sentence that this Ohio neighbor will have to serve is 6 months in prison and 3 years of probation. In addition to this, she will also have to pay back all the money she illegally collected from her father’s retirement benefits. This type of sentencing is not always the case, as sometimes they do not have to pay back the money, but this time the judge wanted it to be so.
Kenneth L. Parker, Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio said that “This money was intended for some of our nation’s most vulnerable people: retirees, widows and people with disabilities, among others,” This statement explains why it is so important for Social Security money to go back to the trust funds where it came from.