The Puerto Rico Family Department confirmed that it kept paying long-term care homes for elderly residents who had already died, after their names were not removed from the system in time.^[1] The agency described the cases as isolated in its confirmation, dated 2026-04-12. It did not, in these facts, put a number on how many payments went out or how much money was involved. The scale of the island's elderly population gives the question its weight. Government statistics show about 32,857 deaths in Puerto Rico from 2024 to 2025, against about 17,950 births in the same stretch.^[2][3] How many of those deaths slipped past the department's removal process, and what it is doing to catch them, is not answered in what the agency has confirmed so far.