A Maryland mother was left stunned with a pile of bills after her death was declared due to a rare typo.
Nicole Paulino tried to renew her driver's license through the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles, but was confused when she received a text denying her identification because government records showed she was no longer alive. did.
“I'm starting to get a little scared, I'm not going to lie.” the mother of three told NBC 4. “I’m surprised to be here.”
The Gaithersburg resident then received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) calling her a “deceased taxpayer.”
As a result of this false information, Paulino and her three children had their health insurance terminated.
“This is really messing up my life,” Paulino told NBC 4 through tears.
Local TV stations reportedly began asking various government agencies, leading to the Social Security Administration (SSA) admitting that a typo was the cause.
The SSA told Paulino that the funeral home tried to report someone else's death, but the employee made a single digit mistake when entering the Social Security number.
Instead of entering the deceased's number, Paulino's Social Security number was entered, creating a pile of paperwork to correct her record.
Ms. Paulino discovered the problem in November 2024, but the government did not declare her “alive” until January 14, 2025, when the SSA acknowledged an administrative error.
The problem left Paulino in desperate need of an inhaler to manage his asthma, leading to months of medical bills that ultimately left him unable to use his health insurance to cover the costs himself.
“It affected me a lot. It affected my health and mental health,” Paulino said.
The Social Security Administration insisted in a statement to NBC 4 that its records are “highly accurate.”
“Of the millions of death reports we receive each year, less than a third of 1% are subsequently corrected,” the SSA claimed.
That equates to nearly 10,000 false alarms each year, News 4 reported, and also means Paulino's plight is not entirely unique.
A St. Louis, Missouri, woman who was mistakenly declared dead for nearly 20 years came forward in 2023 to explain the situation.
The SSA falsely declared Madeline-Michelle Carsen dead in 2007, and she claims the mistake prevented her from graduating college, holding a job and buying a home.
Carsen was unable to graduate from Webster University because he was denied financial aid.
If she tries to get a job, she ends up getting fired.
“Sometimes I can get a job and then problems come up months later. So it's like I can get it and then it gets pulled back from me. But we don't know when it will be withdrawn.” she told NBC News.
Carsen still didn't know how his name ended up on the list and was still trying to resolve the issue in September 2023.
