‘It’s a Pain In the Behind’: A Philadelphia Woman Nearly Lost Everything After She Was Declared Dead By Mistake. Social Security Administration Calls a Statistical Fluke — But It’s Ruining Lives
For several months, whenever Renee Williams walked into a store to make a purchase or answered a phone call about her bank account, she half-joked: “Let me check if I’m still alive today.” But behind her dry wit and slight grin is an ordeal that’s no laughing matter.
For more than six months, the West Philadelphia woman has been fighting to reverse the fallout from a Social Security Administration error that mistakenly declared her dead. The glitch landed her on the agency’s “Death Master File” — a government list that’s supposed to track the deceased — and triggered a cascade of life-altering disruptions: her bank accounts froze, health insurance vanished, and monthly retirement benefits were delayed or cut off without warning.
“I go to sleep at night and think about if they’re going to cut me off again, not knowing day-to-day what’s going to happen to my benefits,” Williams said, according to CBS News Philadelphia.
While she’s managed to claw back some control — switching insurance providers and getting monthly checks again — the ordeal continues to leave scars. As of early May, Williams was still untangling issues related to her credit cards and banking.
“It’s a pain in the behind,” she said last November. That sentiment hasn’t changed much.
Her experience isn’t unique — and now, it’s the foundation for a broader legal fight. Philadelphia consumer protection attorney Jim Francis has launched a proposed class action lawsuit targeting the Social Security Administration on behalf of people wrongly listed as deceased.
“These are all people who are going about their normal lives, and all of the sudden, they lose access to all of their benefits, their pension, their medical insurance and they become financially paralyzed,” Francis said. “It’s a really serious problem and in the world of data being misreported this is almost as bad as it gets, if not the worst.”
Francis is representing the family of Joyce Evans, a Baltimore woman whose death was misreported by the SSA in 2023. The family claims the error caused extensive financial and health issues and may have contributed to her death a few months later. The SSA has not responded to the lawsuit.
The agency maintains that its records are “highly accurate,” stating that of the more than three million deaths reported each year, “less than one-third of one percent” require correction. But even that tiny error rate translates into nearly 10,000 living Americans wrongly declared dead every year.
The issue has become more urgent amid significant staffing cuts. As of this spring, 7,000 SSA employees were terminated due to DOGE cuts. At the same time, the Trump administration has taken aim at the opposite problem: stopping payments that continue to go to individuals who are actually deceased. A recent Inspector General audit revealed the SSA made about $300 million in improper payments over a five-year span from 2018 to 2022.
And while Williams is still navigating the aftermath, another woman’s life has unraveled over a much longer timeline.
Madeline-Michelle Carthen, a 52-year-old from St. Louis, Missouri, discovered her name was on the Death Master File back in 2007, just as she was preparing for a summer internship in Ghana through Webster University. What started as a clerical error turned into a 17-year nightmare.
“A nightmare of corruption. No oversight with government. It’s like a haunting,” Carthen said to local station KDSK in a 2023 interview. “I got denied my financial aid. Now, they’re saying, ‘Prove to us you’re not dead.’”
At first, Carthen thought it was some kind of mix-up.
“I laughed,” she recalled. “I said, ‘What do you mean? I’m sitting right here. I’ve been at school over a year and a half. … How am I dead? Is this going to affect my international internship?’”
SSA issued her a letter affirming she was alive, but the error had already been broadcast across multiple federal systems.
“Well, it got worse because it wasn’t creditors,” she said. “Being in the Death Master File, it went to the IRS, it went to the Department of Homeland Security, it went to E-verify, all of these things. It just started affecting my life.”
The consequences were devastating. Carthen was forced to quit school and lost multiple jobs because human resources departments couldn’t process her payroll. She’s been unable to secure housing and currently lives with her sister because she can’t get a mortgage.
“Sometimes I can get a job, and then within so many months, there’s going to be a problem. So it’s like I can get it, and then it’s yanked back from me. But I don’t know when it’s going to be yanked back,” she said. “I just know I’m alive. I don’t care what A.I. says or software says, but I’m alive. But it’s hard to prove that.”
She changed her name and was issued a new Social Security number in 2021, hoping to close the chapter for good. But even the new number was flagged, thanks to its tie to her old identity.
St. Louis consumer protection attorney Creighton Cohn says being declared dead affects every corner of someone’s life. “It can really impact every single aspect of your life,” Cohn told the station for the 2023 report. “So the first is to figure out where the information came from, so get your credit report.”
Carthen filed a $12 million federal lawsuit against the SSA and other agencies in 2019. It was dismissed under sovereign immunity, the legal doctrine that often shields the federal government from lawsuits.
David Seymour, an SSA spokesperson, reiterated that the agency receives three million death reports a year and that errors are rare. But for people like Carthen, that’s little comfort.
“I don’t know how this is going to work out,” she said. “I just keep advocating and fighting, and when I say fighting, within my spirit. Sometimes, I wanna give up, but my faith is too strong. I don’t care if it takes 20 years. I’m going to still do what I got to do to make this situation right, not just for myself but for others.”
The Social Security Administration advises anyone who believes they’ve been incorrectly listed as deceased to immediately contact their local SSA office and bring an original form of identification to begin the correction process.
But as both Williams and Carthen have found, proving you’re alive in the eyes of the government can take years —and in the meantime, it can feel like the system has already buried you.