A 47-year-old El Cajon man has pleaded guilty to federal charges after admitting he hid his former coworker's 2016 death so he could keep collecting nearly $300,000 in retirement benefits meant for the dead man. Ivan Alonso Rodriguez spent benefits from Social Security and the Office of Personnel Management that had been deposited into an account he had been given access to years earlier.
A Trusted Coworker Turned Sole Trustee
Rodriguez and the man identified only as R.J.W. had served together as police officers at Naval Base San Diego, according to CBS 8. Before his death, R.J.W. had named Rodriguez as the sole trustee of his living trust, granted him power of attorney over his affairs, and given him access to the bank account that received his retirement benefit payments. R.J.W. went on to retire from his police job at the base, and he also added Rodriguez as a co-signatory on the account that continued collecting his federal benefits.
That web of financial authority became the mechanism for the fraud, the station's report indicates. When R.J.W. died in 2016, Rodriguez received news of the death while in Baja California. Rather than notify the government or the bank, he said nothing — and the payments, which came from Social Security and the Office of Personnel Management, kept flowing into the account for years afterward.
Nine Years of Spending Before Charges Followed
Court records described in the same account show Rodriguez spent more than $200,000 in retirement insurance benefits, $85,000 in Federal Employees Retirement System benefits, and $3,200 in economic impact payments — all intended for R.J.W., all collected long after his former coworker had died. He was charged with retention of stolen public money, per the U.S. Attorney's Office as cited by the outlet.
Rodriguez is scheduled to be sentenced on February 12, 2027, in the U.S. Southern District of California. He faces up to ten years in prison and a fine of twice the gross gain from the offense, according to the report.
Part of a Recurring Pattern Nationally
Cases of beneficiaries quietly collecting a deceased relative's or associate's federal payments are not unique to San Diego County. In a separate case, Abel Jose Perez pleaded guilty to theft of public property after taking $271,925.60 in Social Security retirement benefits meant for his father, who had died in 1997, according to the SSA Office of the Inspector General. In another, a woman named Stephanie Carethers pleaded guilty to a theft charge after taking roughly $702,000 in federal retirement pension benefits following her mother's death, the U.S. Department of Justice has reported. Those cases underscore how long such schemes can run when a recipient's death goes unreported to the agencies still cutting checks.
