A check payable to my mom's estate, with me listed as Trustee of the estate, was just received at my address. The amount is $160.00 - an amount less than the amount of her total check when she was alive. We are still settling her affairs so have an active account. She did not receive a check after she died on the 27th of Nov (Thanksgiving) almost 3 years ago. I don't know if that made a difference given there are 30 days in the month. So SS knows she died, knows I handle affairs, yet sent a check with no explanation so long after. The mortuary notified Social Security immediately upon her death so SS knew of her death right away. SS never sent any monthly check after her death.
I'll spend an a.m. at SS and bring a book in case I have to wait a couple hours. Some bottled water too. If I can deposit the $160.00 that would be equal to $80.00/hr. for my time and it would solve the mystery. I can live with that. There is also a part of me that wants to be sure it's legitimate because ID theft happens to both live and deceased people.
When my father died SS withdrew money they had already deposited in his and my Mom's account, which is normal depending on when in they month a person dies. However, they withdrew too much. I caught it and after hours on the phone and a visit to the social security office, they refunded the money, about 3 months after they agreed with me about the error, and about 6 months after he died.
I would think it is possible that such an error happened for you Dad, it wasn't caught, and finally with audits, etc, the discrepancy came up and they finally got around to refunding.
If you do want help figuring it out I suggest going to the SS office in person. I had very bad luck over the phone - the people I talked to just knew the patter, and didn't know how to dig into the numbers. The person at the SS office spent probably about 30 minutes typing away on her computer to figure out what was going on and verifying that there was an error. She was very helpful.