Joyce Evans received an alarming letter two days before Christmas 2023. The Social Security Administration had declared her dead.

The letter touched off a bureaucratic nightmare for Evans, then 88, a retired federal worker from Glen Burnie. Her pension was terminated. Her health insurance benefits were cut off. Her home was listed for short sale. Even her water was turned off.

Seven months after she descended into this Kafkaesque situation, Evans was dead.

Now her children have filed a class action lawsuit against the Social Security Administration, claiming that the agency’s sloppy practices led to Evans and tens of thousands of others being wrongly classified as dead.

When Social Security wrongly declares people dead, “consumers become instantly financially paralyzed as they lose access to all of their rights and benefits,” the suit alleges. “They in fact die in the financial world.”

Evans’ daughter, Victoria Hilbun, said the error was “devastating” for her mother, who spent 30 years working as a forensic accountant for the Small Business Administration and was the matriarch of a family spanning five generations.

“She was a very family-oriented person. She went to all the family parties, all the kids’ parties,” said Hilbun. “She was very involved in everyone’s life.”

The federal suit, which was filed on March 20 by Michael Belsky, Sarah Smith and Joe Yahr of Baltimore’s SBWD Law and James Francis of the Francis Mailman Soumilas law firm of Philadelphia, asks that the administration “verify the accuracy of the death records it publishes” and pay “actual, statutory and punitive damages” to those who were wrongly declared dead.

A spokesperson for the Social Security Administration said the agency did not comment on pending litigation. A March press release from the agency acknowledges that “less than one-third of 1%” of the more than 3 million deaths reported each year are erroneous, or fewer than 9,900 people.

According to the suit, Evans, aided by her son and caretaker, undertook great efforts to prove that she was still alive. She faxed a “Living Status Information Form” to the United States Office of Personnel Management. Her son brought her to Social Security offices in person to fill out another form attesting that she was alive.

Although Evans received a letter from Social Security in January admitting the mistake, her nightmare continued, the suit says. Wells Fargo closed her bank account, which led to her water being shut off for lack of payment. Medicare and Blue Cross and Blue Shield cut off her health insurance. Her credit cards and retirement checks were terminated.

Evans visited Social Security offices multiple other times to correct the mistake, but the Office of Personnel Management continued to claim she was dead “because SSA was still reporting her deceased, notwithstanding its 2 earlier letters recognizing the error and her 3 in-person disputes,” the suit contends.

Evans’ daughter said attending the meetings was physically taxing for her mother, as she used a wheelchair and used an oxygen tank.

Without health insurance, Evans could not afford her medications, including her heart medication, and she had to borrow money to pay for them, according to the suit.

Evans’ “medical condition deteriorated significantly due to the tremendous stress she endured ... and the severe financial impact on her life the misreporting caused,” the suit says.

She died on July 24, 2024, seven months and one day after she received the first letter declaring her dead.

Evans’ son and daughter will be speaking at a press conference at SBWD’s offices in Baltimore at 11 a.m. Wednesday.

The Trump administration has previously falsely claimed the opposite problem from that alleged in the suit — that tens of millions of dead people older than 100 years were receiving Social Security payments.

President Donald Trump tasked Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla, with fixing this issue and cleaning up the federal government by finding waste and fraud through the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE.

DOGE shared on the social media platform X, owned by Musk, on March 31 that the government agency spent the last four weeks cleaning up the Social Security records of nearly 9.9 million people who were listed as alive at the ages of 120 to 160. With another 2 million to go.

SSA Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek said in a February press release that there were records of people older than 100 years old who did not have a date of death on their record.

However, “these individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.” Starting April 14, the SSA is implementing new identity verification procedures, including creating an online SSA account and providing in-person identity proofing, according to a press release.

Hilbun said she hopes the suit will prevent others from suffering the ordeal her mother went through.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “They need to do something. They need to change.”