This probably sounds like one of those “funny” stories that wind up in various skits, but it’s something that actually happens and can have serious results. What happens to a U.S. citizen if the government declares them to be legally dead while they are still alive and well? The results can be incredibly damaging if the situation isn’t corrected promptly. In the case of Madeline-Michelle Carthen of St. Louis, Missouri, she learned that making that correction can be daunting or perhaps impossible. In 2007, while preparing for an overseas internship, she learned that her social security number had been added to a federal database of deceased persons. Her life has essentially been a nightmare ever since, despite endless efforts to prove that she is, in fact, still alive. (NBC News)

Sixteen years ago, Madeline-Michelle Carthen was preparing for a summer internship in Ghana after she was accepted into Webster University’s intern exchange program when she received shocking news: her social security number was associated with a deceased person.

“I laughed,” Carthen, from St. Louis, Missouri, said in a phone call on Tuesday, initially dismissing it as a simple mistake. “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?’”

The mistake wasn’t a simple fix and cost Carthen, now 52, her livelihood. She had to withdraw from school and over the years has been fired from jobs and kicked out of her home: all because on paper it says she died in 2007.

The entire article is worth a look. Carthen has been going through a bureaucratic meatgrinder for more than a decade and a half. She has lost multiple jobs after Human Resources ran her information and found out that her social security number was “invalid.” She lost her home and has been kicked out of apartments despite making her rent payments on time. She now lives with her sister because she doesn’t have an identity that can be verified in “The System.”

Many of us were likely not even aware that the Social Security system maintains a database known as the Death Master File, a data source listing internal SSA records of people who died and possessed social security numbers. Having such a system makes sense because it cuts down on the ability of fraudsters to use fake SSNs to move money around. But if you wind up on the list in error, getting off can prove impossible.

Carthen contacted the SSA and was told her name was added “in error” and she was given a “death erroneous letter.” She was told she could send that to creditors, and she did. But she was having trouble with far more financial entities than just creditors and many of them either didn’t know or didn’t care that she had a letter from the Social Security Administration. They just knew that her name showed up on the SSA’s list and rejected her.

Despite receiving the “error” acknowledgment from the SSA and receiving the letter, her name has remained on the list. She has submitted dozens of documents that the SSA claims should have cleared the error, and yet no satisfaction has been achieved. In 2019, Carthen filed a lawsuit against the SSA seeking a resolution, but her case was dismissed in court because the Social Security Administration has “sovereign immunity” in such cases. (This bizarre premise claims that the federal government “cannot be sued without its consent.”)

In desperation, she got the SSA to issue her a new social security number under a new name (after legally changing it). That didn’t help in many cases because her new SSN is still tied to her old one and shows up as invalid when a check is run. I’d like to say there is a happy ending to this story, but there isn’t. She’s still in limbo, despite the SSA admitting their own error as soon as it was detected. This sounds like a situation that requires someone in Congress to step up as a champion, not just for Madeline-Michelle Carthen, but for anyone this might happen to.