How does everyone monitor Social Security benefit accounts at their bank?

Especially, determining an account holder who has died, and freezing their account so that relatives do not take the monies in the account until we are notified by the Social Security Administration?

Thanks

When Social Security learns of a recipient's death, they notify the bank that receives the direct deposit. This often takes place several weeks before a request for reclamation (if reclamation is applicable). So you'll want to make sure you have good procedures in place for acting upon these notices.

Also, make sure you have similar procedures in place for protecting funds when you're notified of a customer's death through other means (such as direct notification by family).

If we know that the customer has died by obituary, family, other monitoring, can we freeze the account if there is not co-signer, or do we have to contact Social Security prior to doing that?

As you know, sometimes it is difficult to either contact someone from Soc Sec.

You don't need notice from Social Security to freeze an account. The purpose of the freeze is to protect the bank from paying out funds that may be claimed by another party. A Social Security reclamation is just one example of how such a claim might arise.

I don't recommend going out of your way to monitor for customer deaths (such as scanning obituaries), but I do recommend acting on any knowledge of customer death that you gain through the ordinary course of business.

All that said, keep in mind that mistakes can be, and have been made in obituatires, family reports, and even Social Security notices. So in freezing an account, be sure that you're not doing anything to actually pay out the funds until you've been presented with a proper claim to the funds- either by a documented representative of the decedent's estate, or (in the case of errors) by the original customer walking through your front door to refute the reports of their demise.

I had one years ago when a customer was reported deceased by SSA but was sill alive. We were able to remove the hold when she came in to the branch as she was known to us. It was a mess on her part to get it straigh with SSA. I do not recall the many of the details but I beleive that her husband had passed away several years prior and SSA updated their systems it caused the issue. Fortunately it was fixed before we recieved a reclamation.

Thanks JacFSB.

Is there a website (preferably free) that a bank can confirm if someone is deceased if the bank has been told that customer is dead?

The only central repository for that information that I am aware of is the Social Security Death Master File, which is updated monthly. You can't access the list directly through SSA, but here is their fact page that directs users to the official distributor of the list.

A number of consumer reporting agencies and id verification services used for CIP also subscribe to the list, so if you have a vendor that you use for non-documentary customer verification, you may want to see if they can facilitate DMF inquiries.