Florida woman, 84, has been wrongly declared dead for 2 years since her husband died — canceling her bank account, credit card and even her vote

“I kept my sense of humor about it early on, because we can all make mistakes and push the wrong button,” Slack told WFLA News Channel 8. Her sense of humor has waned in the years since.

As you might expect, being legally dead can cause a lot of problems for a person that’s alive. Slack’s had issues holding bank accounts, paying taxes and even voting since being declared dead two years ago.

Here’s what Slack — and others like her — have to deal with when the Social Security Administration (SSA) makes a mistake.

Slack isn’t the only one

The SSA is in charge of declaring people legally dead; it does so by uploading the deceased’s Social Security number to the Death Master File. Sometimes, it makes mistakes.

“Social Security announced today that more than 3 million deaths are reported to the Social Security Administration each year and explains that the agency’s records are highly accurate,” reads a 2025 press release from the SSA. “Of these millions of death reports received each year, less than one-third of 1% are erroneously reported deaths that need to be corrected.”

That’s a small percentage, but it still leaves around 10,000 people incorrectly reported as dead who have to figure out how to come back to life.

Of course, that’s only counting accidents. More recently, the SSA has found itself in hot water after two incidents where living people were intentionally put on the Death Master File as a form of government intimidation.

In 2025, the White House put more than 6,000 living immigrants’ names onto the Death Master File in an attempt to force them to leave the country.

In 2026, a whistleblower told the government that Trump officials were planning to mark 2.7 million immigrants — including U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead on the Death Master file for the same reason.

A Department of Government Efficiency worker told Marketwatch that “either the lives of these individuals would be ruined… and they would be driven to ‘self-deport’” or they would have to go to a local SSA office to correct the error, at which point the Department of Homeland Security would detain them for deportation.

Potentially because of the whistleblower, the SSA did not ever go through with the plan to add millions of immigrants to the Death Master File.

Being declared legally dead is a financial nightmare

Being legally dead can, ironically, make it almost impossible to afford to live.

The living people on the Death Master File quickly find themselves locked out of their own bank accounts. They can also have their health insurance benefits denied, their credit scores set to zero and their Social Security benefits rescinded.