Raymond Kenneth Musgrove seemed to have hit on a perfect scam. He impersonated a Vietnam war veteran for more than 25 years, authorities say, collecting service-related disability benefits and health care under the man’s name.
After the real veteran died in 2018 the Veterans Affairs Department cut off the benefits. Investigators say Mr. Musgrove called and convinced them he was still alive and the dead veteran was the fraudster, and they restarted the payments.
In 2021, the VA’s inspector general located the veteran’s headstone at Ft. Sill National Cemetery and urged the department to cut off benefits. Court documents say Mr. Musgrove once again convinced them the veteran, identified only by initials J.M.C., was still alive. Payments began again.
All told, authorities say, Mr. Musgrove walked away with more than $825,000 in bogus benefits, much of that paid out after J.M.C. was already dead.
Payments to dead people are one of the more infuriating aspects of government spending, especially when they involve bureaucratic bungling or outright fraud.
From disaster relief payments to farm subsidies, the government has trouble sorting out when it’s paying someone who’s already gone. OpenTheBooks.com, a spending watchdog, said federal agencies self-reported $1.3 billion in improper payments to dead people in fiscal year 2023.
“Your corner grocery store has better internal financial controls than the major agencies of the United States federal government,” said Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks. “The sheer amount of federal mistakes begs the question, ‘Is there anything that the federal government does well?’”
Perhaps the most infamous single example was the pandemic stimulus debacle, when the IRS sent $1.4 billion in checks in 2020 to a million people who’d died in 2019. In that case, the IRS said it felt bound by the pandemic relief law to pay every person who filed taxes in 2019 regardless of whether they were still among the living.
Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, said payments to dead people are part of what’s known in government-speak as “improper payments,” but they’re among the most galling to taxpayers.
“It’s the kind of wasteful spending that should be easier than the other types to stop. It shouldn’t be that hard to find out who’s deceased and then you stop the payments,” he said. “It’s pretty poor management when the VA is literally shown the headstone of this guy that’s deceased.”
The VA was also victimized by Irene Ferrin, an Ohio woman who collected benefits under the name of her mother, a widow of a World War II vet, for 48 years after her death in 1973.
Ferrin lied to the VA on at least seven occasions to keep the benefits flowing.
The VA declined to answer questions about Mr. Musgrove, the man who twice got them to restart benefits for a dead veteran, citing the ongoing case.
But in response to Ferrin’s case, it said the agency has checks in place to try to suss out extravagant claims.
“In 2019, VA instituted a match to be run periodically using data from other agencies to confirm whether Veterans and beneficiaries over the age of 100 are alive and entitled to benefits,” the department told The Washington Times. “In addition, VA annually reviews the records of all Veterans and beneficiaries receiving compensation, pension, or survivor benefits who are age 100 or older.”
That’s little comfort to taxpayers, though, because once the money is paid out the government rarely gets it back.
Ferrin, who was spared any prison time by the judge in her case, was still ordered to repay $462,000. Given she was 76 at the time of her sentencing and had already given up her job to provide round-the-clock care for her 80-year-old husband, her chances of repaying much of that are slim.
In the case of the IRS stimulus checks, the agency asked people to repay the money. But after six months, just 60,000 of the million payments had been returned, covering $72 million. That’s about 5% of the money paid out.
Mr. Schatz said that in addition to the VA, Social Security is another offender of paying dead people.
That was the case for Timothy Gritman, sentenced in February to 60 months in prison for collecting his dead father’s Social Security payments as well as New York state pension benefits.
Authorities say Ralph Gritman was last confirmed alive in September 2017 when Medicare showed him making an emergency visit to a hospital. Investigators figure he died soon after, but the son never reported the death and collected nearly $205,000 in benefits between then and October 2022.
New York investigators cut off benefits in 2022 but Timothy Gritman posed as his father, going so far as to whiten his hair and eyebrows, to create a fake ID card to try to fool the state into thinking the older man was still alive. The son still has not revealed where his father’s remains are.
As brazen as that fraud is it pales in comparison to George Doumar, who stole nearly half a million dollars in Social Security benefits sent to his aunt, who died in 1977. The scam lasted until 2020.
His lawyer said Doumar became trapped by how long he got away with it. At some point, he figured that he’d crossed a line and admitting what he’d done would net serious consequences, so he was compelled to keep it up.
Investigators, figuring his aunt would have been the second-oldest person receiving Social Security, finally swooped in and he admitted his fraud.
The delay may have paid off for Doumar, however. He was sentenced in 2021 to just three years’ probation, with federal prosecutors asking the judge to go easy on the 78-year-old man because of the pandemic and his health issues.
He was ordered to try to pay back $443,358.30.
This week brought another sentencing for Travis Gober, slapped with a 19-month term for running a business that bilked Medicare for payments for sleep studies that were never performed.
Among them were hundreds of studies for 19 people who were already dead at the time Gober said they were being treated.
A federal investigator told the court that Medicare managed to block payments for the dead people but did pay out more than $1 million on sleep studies for live people who never actually got the treatments. A Medicare investigator visited Gober’s business office in 2016 and 2017 and found it shuttered, and California suspended the business license in 2018 but Gober continued to bill Medicare — and get paid.
Gober’s lawyer said he was forced into the scam to pay off surprise company debts, then struggled for business during the pandemic.
“This was truly aberrant conduct for an otherwise good person. And when an otherwise good person, like Travis Gober, errs in this manner—they punish themselves far more harshly than any sentence of imprisonment ever could,” said Christina M. Corcoran, the public defender who handled Gober’s case.
Gober asked for probation instead of prison time, but the judge sided with prosecutors in delivering the 19-month sentence. Gober’s brother, Jeremy Gober, ran his own sleep clinics and has also pleaded guilty to healthcare fraud and identity theft. He is awaiting his sentencing.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.