The US Treasury mistakenly sent more than 20 million dollars in stimulus payments to dead people and prisoners as part of an effort to jolt the US economy out of recession, an investigation has found.
The 2009 American Recovery and Investment Act authorized one-time 250 dollar payments to about 52 million people, totalling 13 billion dollars.
But an inspector general's investigation found that more than 71,000 of the checks -- worth 18 million dollars -- went out to people who had died.
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Another 4.3 million dollars were sent to more than 17,000 people who were in prison and were either ineligible for the payment or were not supposed to receive them until after they were out of prison.
"Inaccurate payments are unacceptable," said Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, which was responsible for identifying those eligible for the stimulus payments.
He said, however, that the payments "were 99.8 percent accurate and we quickly collected the majority of the inaccurate payments."
"Each year we make payments to a small number of deceased recipients usually because we have not yet received reports of their deaths."
