By Alec Schemmel | Published at Fox News

The Treasury Department announced this week that it had recouped more than $31 million in fraud and improper payments to dead people during just five short months of having access to the Social Security Administration's (SSA) federal death database. 

The Treasury Department issues billions of payments every year, including benefit payments, federally funded state-administered payments and other miscellaneous payments. Sending those funds and others by accident to people who are dead has been a long-standing problem within the federal government, according to fiscal watchdog group Open the Books.

In 2020, the Government Accountability Office estimated that during the first round of COVID-19 stimulus checks, $1.4 billion was sent to dead people. Across all three rounds of stimulus checks during the pandemic, nearly $3.6 billion went to dead people, according to Open the Books.

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