A federal watchdog has put a price tag on what happens when two of Washington’s data systems finally talk to each other. Giving the Treasury Department’s Do Not Pay system temporary access to the Social Security Administration’s complete death records helped identify, prevent, or recover $113.5 million in improper federal payments during the program’s first year, according to a Government Accountability Office review. For taxpayers, the finding illustrates how much money leaks out through payments to people who are no longer alive, and how far current data-sharing rules still have to go to close that gap for good.
A Three-Year Pilot Turns Death Records Into Real Savings
Before the pilot began, Treasury’s Do Not Pay system, the centralized service federal agencies use to check whether someone is still eligible for a payment before it goes out, only had access to a less-comprehensive version of Social Security’s Death Master File that excluded state-reported death records. Under a three-year pilot program examined in the GAO report, Treasury gained temporary access to SSA’s full file instead. Treasury reported that the pilot’s first year, calendar year 2024, resulted in the identification, prevention, or recovery of $113.5 million in improper payments, against just $4.6 million in costs, a return of roughly 23 times what Treasury spent to run it. Treasury projects the pilot will generate more than $337 million in net benefits over its full three years.
The gap the pilot closed is a familiar one across federal programs: agencies routinely learn of a death weeks or months after it happens, and in the interim, benefit payments, tax refunds, and other federal disbursements can keep going out on autopilot. State vital-records offices often have more current death information than the federal government’s own compiled file, which is why folding state-reported records into the version Treasury can check made such a measurable difference in the first year alone.
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Congress Passed a Bill That Would Make the Access Permanent
The full data-sharing arrangement remains a pilot, not a permanent fixture. In January 2026, Congress passed a bill that, if enacted, would make Treasury’s access to SSA’s complete death file permanent rather than temporary, though the pilot’s current results have already demonstrated the financial case for keeping the arrangement in place regardless of how that legislation proceeds. Improper payments driven by outdated death information have long been flagged as a persistent federal problem, and GAO’s report frames up-front eligibility verification through data sharing as one of the more effective tools agencies have for preventing improper payments before they go out the door, rather than trying to claw the money back afterward.
Improper payments have been a persistent line item in the federal government’s own financial reporting for years, spanning everything from unemployment insurance to Medicare to Social Security itself, and death-related payments are one of the more preventable categories because the underlying fact, that someone has died, is usually knowable in advance if the right records reach the right agency in time. That is precisely the case GAO makes for expanding rather than shrinking data-sharing pilots like this one: the return on investment during the first year alone, roughly 23 times what Treasury spent, is high enough that GAO frames the open question as being about how the program is funded and governed long-term, not whether it works.
Who Actually Pays for the Death Data, and Why That’s Getting Complicated
The savings come with a cost that has been rising. States own the death records that feed the system, and federal law requires SSA to pay them for it. After concluding new contracts with states in September 2023, SSA paid states $23.8 million for death data in 2024, a significant jump from the year before. GAO found SSA did not obtain the state cost information required by law before agreeing to those payments, instead striking a fee structure based on how quickly states submitted records rather than on what the data actually cost states to produce.
GAO also found SSA changed its method for billing other federal agencies, including Treasury, their share of those costs, basing it on each agency’s overall share of federal spending rather than on actual usage, a shift that cut SSA’s own share of the 2025 cost pool from 42 percent to 23 percent while spreading more of the bill to Treasury and other agencies without regard to their actual data usage. GAO issued three recommendations directing SSA to align its state contracts and cost-sharing formulas with statutory requirements, and the agency agreed with all three.
Better data-sharing stopped payments flowing to people who had died. There’s no equivalent system catching living households that qualify for help and never apply for it — VA Aid & Attendance, LIHEAP energy assistance, and senior property-tax relief programs all depend on someone filing the paperwork first. The Benefits Checklist brings these programs together with 2026 income and asset limits and the state office that administers each.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Financial Wire editorial team.
David M. Keller is a finance writer based in Columbus, Ohio, covering personal finance and consumer-focused economic topics. He earned his degree in journalism from Ohio University and began his career reporting on local business and economic trends for a regional media outlet. Since then, he has contributed to a variety of online publications, focusing on clear, practical coverage of topics such as cost of living, debt, and everyday financial decision-making.
