The federal government has paid-out more than $600 million over the past five years to dead retirees, the Washington Post reports. Annual payouts range between $100 million and $150 million in wasted taxpayer money. The report was issued by the inspector general of the Office of Personnel Management.

Inspector General Patrick E. McFarland, who previously reported on the improper payments in 2005 and 2008, urged OPM to more closely track such mistakes.

“It is time to stop, once and for all, this waste of taxpayer money,” he wrote in the report.

There’s a long history of the federal government paying out to dead retirees, but such waste has increased by 70% over the past five years.

The payments are on the rise because OPM is doing a poor job of tracking potential cheats, McFarland said. In one case, a deceased annuitant’s son continued receiving federal benefits until 2008 — 37 years after his father’s death. OPM learned about the improper payments — which exceeded $515,000 — only after the son died. The agency never recovered the money.

The feds are allowing the people who take advantage of these improper payments to get away with screwing taxpayers. And yet the screwing continues to this day.

But this isn’t the worst of it. When you start tallying improper payments overall, you count in the billions of dollars.

Overall, the government’s improper payments totaled about $125 billion in fiscal 2010 — a $15 billion year-to-year increase resulting from a growing number of unemployment insurance and Medicaid payments. Despite the jump, federal agencies recovered about $687 million mistakenly paid to delinquent government contractors and beneficiaries.

$125 billion in improper payments and just $687 million recovered.

You know, when it takes an inspector general to realize the government wasted $125 billion in just one year, it may be that the federal government may be too damn big. Just a thought.