Death Master File

The Ultimate Guide to Finding Decedents in the Insurance Industry

How to identify decedents efficiently and effectively without a single and comprehensive data source. Insurance companies deal with a variety of challenges when managing their policyholders (life, long term care, PRT, structured settlements, annuitants), with inaccurate or missing participant data being the most impactful. Incorrect information affects how insurance companies communicate with policyholders, accurate forecasting of risk, the number of overpayments made, access to information when a Department of Labor [...]

John Bikus2024-04-26T15:04:57-05:00April 12th, 2023|Death Audit & CertiDeath, Insurance|

Why the DMF isn’t Adequate for Insurance Companies

Identifying deaths has become harder for insurance companies. In 2011, a change to the SSA Death Master File (DMF) fundamentally altered the Death Audit landscape resulting in challenges to Death Audit providers accompanied by a significantly increased burden placed on insurance companies to accurately identify deaths of policyholders. Because of this, missed deaths are leading to overpayments for insurance companies in their Pension Risk Transfer (PRT) and Structured Settlements lines of business. In Long Term Care (LTC), [...]

John Bikus2024-05-01T14:24:57-05:00February 9th, 2023|Death Audit & CertiDeath, Insurance|

$1.4B Stimulus Overpayments to Deceased Persons Happen Annually – To Pension Plans

Data in this blog post was updated on April 26, 2024. Recent analyses of the federal government’s coronavirus stimulus payments indicate up to $1.4 billion in payments were sent to dead people. The overpayments were a function of two elements: no formal process was utilized to identify deceased persons and it doesn’t appear the federal agencies responsible for payments had access to all the necessary data. This same overpayment issue is happening for similar [...]

John Bikus2024-04-26T14:50:12-05:00May 20th, 2021|Death Audit & CertiDeath, Pensions|

How Do You Handle False Positives from the Death Master File?

Death Audit false positives are defined as identifying a decedent who isn’t actually deceased. False positives result in unplanned organizational expense and incorrect payment stoppage. As a result, false positives can be painful to both those sending and receiving ongoing planned payments, e.g. pension plans/participants and beneficiaries, insurance companies/annuitants. Minimizing false positives while maximizing number of decedents identified should be the goal of any Death Audit system. However, it is virtually impossible to avoid [...]

John Bikus2024-04-26T14:46:43-05:00February 25th, 2021|Death Audit & CertiDeath|