Sorry to Hear You're Dead

Computers don't always get it right (from Special Report):

And a 42-year-old man in Oregon City, Oregon got quite a shock when he opened his mail last week and found out he was dead. The Oregonian newspaper reports a letter from the Social Security Administration informed Robert Charlan that he was deceased and would no longer receive his monthly payments. Charlan went to the Social Security office and the man at the counter also told him that he was dead. Charlan said, "How can I be deceased if I'm sitting right in front of you?"

A few days later he went back and they cut him an emergency check. One of Social Security's computer people says he's never seen anything like this before — saying it was probably a computer glitch.

This gave me an idea. Maybe we should do the same thing for all welfare recipients and make them come in and identify themselves before we restart payments. That could weed out a lot of fraud and abuse (not to mention dead people).