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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why they're making a news story out of this $34 million dollar error without mentioning that they also sent $1.7 billion to the deceased. Neither seem newsworthy to me, but only detailing the cheapest error is strange.

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Eh this one doesn’t seem that strange to me. People die every day, a lot of them. Sending a check to an American that died and hasn’t been reported upwards to the federal government is not surprising. Sending money to non Americans who are not in America is a bit of a head scratcher. How did that even happen? I don’t care enough about 34 million dollars to look any further into it but I am curious about who these people are and how they got sent checks by the US government. Did they live here once upon a time and left? That would make sense to me, not dissimilar from the dead not dead people, just stale data and speed was the stated goal so stale data is to be expected.

Those noncitizens mentioned in the article all happen to receive social security payments from the US, due to having worked there in the past.

> Asked about this by NPR, the IRS acknowledged it mistakenly sent checks to some noncitizens who receive Social Security and other federal benefits — such as Wigforss, who receives a small Social Security payment from having worked in California for several years

To be specific, the checks went to legal aliens who are authorized to work in the US, but did not have wages that were withheld in 2018-2019.

Also, why is this story on the frontpage? If it wasn't an NPR story would it gain any traction here? Not only is it not newsworthy, it is uninteresting. It's more spam than news.

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