Our friends at Open The Books continue to expose government waste - and fraud - and in their latest investigation, they have shone the spotlight on one of the largest wastes in the US government: the Social Security Administration.

What they have uncovered is that last year alone, Social Security admitted to $8 billion in improper and mistaken payments.

The punchline: when they dug deeper, they found that there are six million active social security numbers of people aged 112 and older... even though only 40 or less or those people exist in the world.

The root cause of this collosal abuse: failure to verify death. And yet while you won't read about it in the papers, the four-year total sum to US taxpayers is roughly $2.8 billion, which in today's numbers when trillions are thrown around may not sound like much, but add up all the other areas of government waste, and soon you end up with far greater numbers.