Missing Money

Is it any surprise Washington can’t find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Hey, they can’t even find our money they’re spending here at home.

The Hill reports in it’s July 14th edition that the Social Security Administration (SSA) shelled out more than $3 billion in improper payments. You know the SSA, the fine folks who supervise your tax supported retirement plan.

Some of this could be waste, fraud, or simple accounting errors that simply wrote bigger checks than normal to unsuspecting retirees.

What’s more, they could only catch the waste and fraud in 60% of the cases. That’s $1.2 billion they can’t account for.

That’s a lot of money. Imagine a stack of $20 bills. Now imagine a stack of twenties as tall as the 555 foot tall Washington Monument. That’s a start. That’s only a couple million dollars.

One-point-two billion dollars would be 432 stacks of $20 bills that tall.

You’d think that would be kind of hard to misplace.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) calls the findings "astonishing." He claims the SSA doesn’t even have a plan to fix this kind of problem.
 
In a letter to Social Security Administrator Jo Anne Barnhart, Grassley said he didn’t know which was "more troubling:" a) that SSA sent out more than $3 billion in overpayments…or b) that the SSA couldn’t figure out where all that money went.