This is innumeracy masquerading as accountability.

$1.4 billion out of $269 billion—a 0.5% error rate—going to people it shouldn’t have really isn’t that big a deal for money that had to get out the door immediately. https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/06/25/irs-stimulus-checks-dead-people-gao/

Why do some newspapers love stories about things like dead people getting checks? Because it lets them look they're holding power accountable without being ideological.

Everyone, after all, can agree that dead people shouldn't be getting money...

The question, though, is how big a problem this really is. Readers need context. Dollar figures don't give it, since any level of waste in a $20 trillion economy is going to sound huge compared to a single family's income.

Take this front-page story from 2013 about Social Security paying out $133 million to dead people over the previous few years. That sounds bad until you realize, as @DeanBaker13 pointed out, that this meant just 0.006% of its benefits went to dead people. https://cepr.net/social-security-paid-out-0006-percent-of-benefits-to-dead-people/

The real point is that these kind of stories actually *aren't* non-ideological. If you breathlessly report that a 99.994% success rate means that the government is stupidly wasting your money, you're playing into anti-government talking points while also misinforming readers.

Here's how today's GAO report about dead people getting CARES checks should have been covered: with a big, fat yawn. https://slate.com/business/2020/06/irs-stimulus-check-dead-people-yawn.html