Thousands of unsuspecting retirees could lose their Social Security checks in the months ahead, some over false or unproven allegations, minor infractions or long-dormant arrest warrants.
The risk is a consequence of the Fugitive Felon Project, a little-known law-and-order measure created by Congress in 1996 to help apprehend suspects and to prevent fleeing criminals from using government benefits to elude arrest.
Project computers already match names on various welfare lists with names on felony warrants issued around the country. That screening process has led to thousands of arrests among recipients of disability checks alone, including 88 wanted on homicide charges.
But records and interviews also show that the computer dragnet frequently cut off federal benefits to the sick, poor and disabled who were neither fugitives nor felons. Many lacked financial and legal resources to get their benefits restored.
In one case, an Oregon man with a mental disorder was named on an arrest warrant for entering a rental car without permission at an airport parking lot in 1999. Four years later, computers found the record, and the man's federal disability payments stopped. The man committed suicide last year, before his benefits could be reinstated.
An Oregon woman with lung disease lost her monthly disability check and faced the loss of her government-subsidized oxygen supplies over a Nevada arrest warrant she didn't know existed.
And a Minnesota man lost his disability support because he once disrupted Conrail train service in Ohio. He had threatened to kill himself by jumping from a trestle in Toledo. He left the state unaware that he was named on a criminal warrant.
Others regarded as fugitives and denied benefits turned out to have been in nursing homes or wheelchairs and were physically unable to flee.
"They're not fleeing suspects; they're sitting ducks," said Bruce Schweiger, deputy public defender for Los Angeles County and a critic of the project.
LATimes/Yahoo