A Missouri mother claims her life has been ruined by a suspected error that occurred more than two decades ago. Madeline-Michelle Carthen was mistakenly proclaimed dead by social security administrators in 2007. The 52-year-old mother has never been the same after this error was made.
As a result of an error on her social security number, she is now unable to hold down a job, obtain a mortgage, or rent an apartment. Her problems began while she was a student at Webster University, when her application for financial aid was refused, forcing her to drop college.
She was preparing for a summer internship in Ghana when she learned that her social security number had been linked to a deceased individual. Carthen’s financial aid adviser discovered that her Social Security number was classified as deceased. She smiled at the silliness of the scenario at first, dismissing it as a simple error. She was told by school administrators that she would have to withdraw until the problem was resolved.
She phoned the Social Security Administration and discovered that her name had been placed to the agency’s death master file. She was provided a forged death certificate to show to credit bureaus that she was not deceased.
“Well, it got worse, because it wasn’t creditors. Being in the death master file, it went to the IRS, it went to the Department of Homeland Security, it went to E-verify, all of these things. It just started affecting my life,” she said.
Indeed, officials claim that when a person’s identity is wrongly added to the Social Security Administration’s deceased list, their identity is wiped from a variety of critical organizations, including banks, the IRS, and Medicare. This condition can have a significant impact on every aspect of a person’s life.
Carthen described the impact of this setback on her life, stating that it had wrecked everything. According to the Daily Mail, she claims that this has had substantial financial consequences, including her inability to pursue aspirations such as home ownership.
She stated she now has to go through the ordeal of demonstrating she is not dead on a regular basis. She added that anytime her Social Security number is processed, it causes problems with payroll processing, which frequently results in her losing her job. Her paperwork and credit reports incorrectly identified her as deceased.
Unfortunately, Carthen is not alone in dealing with this problem; according to Smithsonian Magazine, more than 12,000 living Americans are incorrectly labeled as deceased each year, frequently due to small typographical errors that can have disastrous effects for the victims.
Carthen has been wrestling with this vexing problem for nearly two decades, seeking clarity and direct answers but coming up empty-handed.
She filed a lawsuit in 2019 against the Social Security Administration and numerous other government organizations, seeking more than $12 million in damages. A judge dismissed the lawsuit, claiming sovereign immunity as the government’s defense against such allegations.