As the
Bears season rapidly came to a close, I was surprised to see 1950’s defensive alumnus
John Helwig in the news, not because the defense was the only saving grace, but
rather John passed 17 years ago. The AP
reported that his
wife, Ruth, told officials that her husband was still alive twice. After
Ruth passed in 2007, his daughter continued to collect funds for an additional
6 years. In total the NFL was left with a tab of more than
$200,000.
I
wanted to see if this situation was preventable. Perhaps Mr. Helwig’s
passing went under the radar of the state and federal government.
However, using Berwyn’s
Quick Look-Up solution
with his first name, last name, and date of birth, it was easy to see that
John’s passing was noted by the State of Michigan’s Dept. of Health and Vital
Statistics and the Social Security Administration (SSA).
The
other two points of interest are: the SSA record listed zip code and the date
of death was 00. Zip codes were regularly released by the SSA, however
with the changes to the Death Master File on 11/1/2011 zip codes were stripped
as a field. Additionally, records were stripped of the date of death, for
a brief period of time as a security measure before it was realized that there
was no security benefit it doing so. To this day though there are frequently
differences between the date of death provided by the state and federal
governments. With the zip code included and a date of death of
12/00/1994 indicates that the NFL could have easily prevented this
over payment early on by checking records.
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