A stunned mother in Maryland was stuck with a pile of bills after a rare typo led to her being declared dead.
Nicole Paulino attempted to renew her driver’s license through the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration but was bewildered when she received a text denying an identification card because government records showed that she wasn’t alive.
“I got a little frightened, I’m not gonna lie,” the mother of three told NBC 4. “I’m surprised because I’m here.”
The Gaithersburg resident then received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) calling her a “deceased taxpayer.”
The false information led to health insurance being canceled for Paulino and her three kids.
“This really really messes up my life,” Paulino tearfully shared with NBC 4.
The local TV station began asking questions to various government agencies, according to the report, leading to the Social Security Administration (SSA) admitting that the error was caused by a typo.
The SSA told Paulino a funeral home attempted to report someone else dead but the employee messed up a single digit while typing in the Social Security number.
Instead of entering the number for the deceased person, Paulino’s social security number was entered and resulted in piles of paperwork to fix her records.
Paulino discovered the problem in November 2024 and the government didn’t declare her “alive” until Jan. 14, 2025 when the SSA admitted to the clerical error.
The issue caused medical bills to pile up for months as Paulino desperately needed to have inhalers to manage her asthma and she wound up covering the costs herself with her health insurance in limbo.
“It has affected me a lot. It’s affected my health, my mental health,” Paulino said.
In a statement to NBC 4, the Social Security Administration insisted that records are “highly accurate.”
“Of these millions of death reports we receive each year, less than one-third of 1 percent are subsequently corrected,” SSA claimed.
That translates to nearly 10,000 false reports each year, according to News 4’s report, and also means Paulino’s dire situation isn’t totally unique.
One woman in St. Louis, Mo. was wrongly labeled dead for nearly two decades and explained the situation back in 2023.
The SSA wrongly declared Madeline-Michelle Carthen dead in 2007 and she claims the error prevented her from finishing college, holding a job and buying a house.
Carthen wasn’t able to finish college at Webster University because she was denied financial aid.
When she tried to enter the workforce, she’d eventually be let go.
“Sometimes I can get a job and then within so many months, there’s going to be a problem. So it’s like I can get it and then it’s yanked back from me. But I don’t know when it’s going to be yanked back,” she shared with NBC News.
Carthen still doesn’t know how her name got on the list and she was still working to fix the problem as of Sept. 2023.
