If the government erroneously declares you dead, odds are you won't know about it until a letter shows up in the mail. That's what happened to most of the people we spoke with in reporting tonight's story.

But you can check to see if you've been added to "the dead list."

The folks at rootsweb.com have put the entire Social Security Death Index online. Plug in your name and see if you show up.

If you do show up... keep reading.

Okay, you're on "the dead list." What should you do now?

First, call Social Security. Chances are, a visit to your local SSA office with your birth certificate and drivers license should clear all this up.

If that doesn't work, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill suggests you contact her office as a next step. Her constituents services staff exists to help people in these kinds of situations.

So what does Social Security have to say about this?

The only person at SSA would speak to me was a low-level spokesman in the Kansas City office. His answer? This isn't a big enough problem for Social Security to worry about.

According to John Garlinger, Social Security processes 2.7 million deaths a year... and "mistakes happen."

Garlinger would only speak to me over the telephone, refusing to appear on camera to defend his agency's position that "mistakes happen."

He also didn't want to appear on camera to explain why Social Security keeps no records of these mistakes.

When Garlinger made it clear he was not willing to discuss this any further, I called his superiors at SSA headquarters in Maryland.

In fact, I called them four times.

Not one of those calls was returned.

So we turned to the former Missouri auditor turned United States senator... Claire McCaskill.

We told her about the fact Social Security was "killing off" people and dismissing it with a shrug and the line "mistakes happen." We told her about the agency's unwillingness to address these issues on camera. We told her about the fact SSA does not keep records of its mistakes... so it doesn't know where they were made or how they can be stopped.

As you can imagine, the former auditor says this is unacceptable.
Senator McCaskill tells me she will do everything within her power to prod SSA into keeping track of these mistakes, in hopes the agency can reduce the possibility that any "mistakes happen."