BALTIMORE, Md. — In December 2023, a very much alive Joyce Evans received a strange letter from the federal government - where she had worked for 30 years.
"She received a letter from the Office of Personnel Management that she was dead and that her monthly pension benefits were to be stopped, Jim Francis, attorney for Francis Mailman Soumilas, said. "She was not dead."
But the damage was already done. The Social Security Administration (SSA) had put her name in what's called the "Death Master File."
Banks and insurance companies routinely run their records against that file, in an effort to prevent fraud.
So one by one, like dominoes, every piece of Joyce's financial world came falling down.
"Her house was foreclosed upon, her bank accounts were closed, and most importantly, her Medicare benefits were stopped. She was left without access to medications for a period of time and suffered greatly," Francis said during a press conference Wednesday.
"She couldn't eat, she couldn't sleep, she went into a major depression," recalled her daughter, Victoria Hilbun.
Evans wrote letters, filled out the relevant paperwork, visited the SSA office, and made phone calls - a lot of them.
"Every day. She was on the phone for 5 to 6 hours a day," Hilbun said.
Even after the SSA acknowledged the error a month later, attorneys for Evans' family say the agency still failed to permanently remove the death record from her file, and "never reported the corrected record to the entities whom it had previously provided the death record."
And so the issue persisted. She died 7 months after that first letter arrived.
Now, her family is filing a class action lawsuit, in the hopes of preventing this from happening to someone else.
"If they don't have anybody to take them to Social Security to let them know they're alive or to buy them food or to help them with their bills, that person is just going to be forgotten, and who knows what's going to happen to them," Hilbun said.
"We are seeking all available remedies under the law, and that provides a lot," Francis said. "There is injunctive relief, there is compensation for the damages that these class members suffered. We will be looking for class certification to have the court certify a class of all people that this happened to."
And attorneys for the family say, it's happened to a lot of people.
The SSA said in a March press release that it's records are "highly accurate," and of the more than 3 million deaths reported every year, less than a third of 1% are wrong.
But that's still close to 10,000 people a year.
Deaths are usually reported to the SSA by state governments, but also often by family members and funeral homes. The agency considers reports from those sources to be verified, and immediately adds them to the "Death Master File."
"If SSA were to just require a death certificate before reporting this out, it would solve the problem overnight and there would be zero errors," Francis said.
The SSA tells WMAR-2 News it does not comment on pending litigation.
The opposite problem also exists as well.
Just a few weeks, the Office of the Inspector General published an audit that found, between 2018 and 2022, the SSA incorrectly rejected 702,000 state death reports that were actually correct. Those people were indeed dead, but the agency kept sending them benefits, resulting in approximately $327 million dollars in improper payments.