He Was Dead To VA; Then Agency Resuscitated North Carolina Vet

FAYETTEVILLE, NC — A veteran from Fayetteville had a Mark Twain-esque experience in a colossal mixup by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Twain famously said that reports of his death had been “ greatly exaggerated,” and the same thing more or less happened to Vietnam vet Charles Covell — and, it turns out, many other veterans across the country.

Covell’s wife, Marcie, discovered her husband was dead to the government when his VA disability checks didn’t show up in his bank account in late February. When the Covells investigated, they learned a death certificate for the 81-year-old retired postal worker had been filed in January.

The VA has since resuscitated Covell and reinstated his benefits, The Fayetteville Observer reported.

The agency said Covell was confused with the Rev. Charles R. Covell, who died in Utica, New York, in September 2011.

Covell wasn’t the only veteran listed as dead in a VA snafu, though. For a year ending in September 2017, the VA suspended benefits for 105,529 veterans who were listed as dead, but 245 of them were later discovered to be alive, The Fayetteville Observer reported.

“That equates to a 99.77 percent accuracy rate,” the VA spokesman told the newspaper. “While the error rates are small, they are still unacceptable, and VA has taken steps to improve our processes.”

To prevent overpayment, the VA compares its records with those maintained by the Social Security Administration, and that’s where the mistakes originated, the spokesman told the Fayetteville newspaper.

The problem isn’t that one-sided, though. Responsibility for inaccurate death records seems to be an endless loop where neither agency completely escapes responsibility.

Not only were live veterans listed as dead, 746 veterans continued to receive Social Security benefits long after they died because of inaccurate VA records, the SSA’s inspector general said. In most of those cases, RT reported, the VA failed to properly disclose death information to the SSA.

“Based on our sample results, we estimate SSA issued about $37.7 million to 746 individuals after they died and will issue approximately $7.3 million more over the next 12 months if these discrepancies are not corrected,” the inspector general said.

In one case, “SSA’s records indicated that someone used the veteran’s SSN to work from 1978 through 1991,” the inspector general said. “In 1991, the suspected identity thief filed for, and began receiving, retirement benefits. SSA issued the suspected identity thief approximately $200,000 in retirement benefits before suspending the payments in May 2017.”

For Covell, his mistaken death hasn’t been the only records snafu. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal of Valor for heroics during a Viet Cong ambush in 1965, but the paperwork was lost and it wasn’t awarded until 40 years later. He spent 12 years in the Army, serving with the 82nd Airborne Division and 5th Special Forces Group at Fort Dodge.

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