WHAT: Because deaths were not reported, more than $600 million in payments for retired or disabled federal workers kept coming after they died, according to a new report from the Office of Personnel Management’s inspector general.

WHY IT’S OUTRAGEOUS: In one case, a beneficiary’s son received payments for 37 years after his father’s death in 1971. The illegal payments totaling more than $515,000 were only discovered when the son died in 2008.

WHAT’S BEING DONE: The government has known about the problem since a 2005 inspector general’s report. But repeated attempts have failed to create a system that identifies which beneficiaries are still alive and which are dead.