Man Collected $585,000 in Disability While Doing THIS

September 24, 2026

Funeral worker in mask moving a wooden coffin on a trolley — Photo: Alexandros Michailidis / Shutterstock

Disability fraud cases that stick do so not because someone with a bad back tried to earn a few dollars, but because a sustained, documented pattern of deception collides with clear program rules; the Stankovits prosecution is a textbook example of that line being crossed.

The Short Version

A federal jury convicted New Jersey funeral director Steven D. Stankovits of wire fraud and making false statements for a long-running Social Security disability scheme; he later received a year-and-a-day prison sentence.
Prosecutors showed that while asserting severe functional limits to the Social Security Administration (SSA), he worked at funeral homes and took ski trips, behavior incompatible with his claims.
The government attributes more than $585,000 in paid benefits to the fraud, tied to false statements and failures to correct them over roughly a decade.
Understanding how the SSA defines disability, work, and reporting obligations clarifies why this case is fraud—not simply “working while disabled.”

What prosecutors proved versus what disability programs actually allow

Disability insurance is not a vow of immobility. SSA programs permit carefully circumscribed work activity—trial work periods, earnings below substantial gainful activity (SGA) thresholds, and mandatory reporting that lets the agency adjust benefits in real time. That complexity matters because “I saw someone on disability working” is not proof of wrongdoing. Fraud requires misrepresentation or concealment that materially affects eligibility or payment amount. In United States v. Steven D. Stankovits, the jury accepted the government’s evidence that he repeatedly told SSA he was unable to work and severely limited, even as he engaged in work and travel inconsistent with those claims; that gulf, documented across years and communications, is what turned this from a compliance error into criminal fraud.

The SSA’s own enforcement history underlines the distinction. A significant share of improper payments stem from beneficiaries failing to report work activity that reaches the SGA level and from delays in SSA’s follow-up reviews; those issues often trigger overpayment recovery, not prosecution. But when evidence shows deliberate false statements and concealment over time, prosecutors treat it as felony fraud under Title 18 and program-specific statutes.

The Stankovits case: the conduct, the paper trail, the verdict

According to the Justice Department, Stankovits obtained a disability entitlement in 2010, retroactive to 2007, based on representations that he was unable to work, could not comfortably sit for more than 15 minutes, could not bend to dress, struggled to lift a carton of milk, and had given up skiing. Over the next decade, he repeated those statements or failed to correct them while SSA continued paying benefits that ultimately totaled more than $585,000. In reality, prosecutors said, he worked as a licensed funeral director at two funeral homes and undertook physically demanding tasks—among them carrying 160-pound caskets down stairs and climbing a ladder to mount signage. He also took ski trips to Cortina d’Ampezzo, Lake Tahoe, and Park City, and bought a season pass at Killington, all while continuing to assert disabling limitations to SSA. A federal jury convicted him of four counts of wire fraud and one count of making false statements; a judge later imposed a year-and-a-day prison term and ordered restitution.

Why these details matter in law is straightforward: the government did not need to show he never had a medical condition; it needed to show material misstatements and omissions that induced or maintained benefit payments. The indictment spelled that theory out explicitly and highlighted a July 7, 2020 Disability Update Report as one of the false-statement anchors. Jurors agreed the statements and the gap with his actual activities were material to SSA’s decisions, which is the legal hinge in a false-statements case.

How SSA defines disability, work, and the duty to report

For Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), disability is defined as the inability to engage in substantial gainful activity due to a medically determinable impairment expected to last at least 12 months or result in death. The system still allows beneficiaries to test their capacity to work under specific rules: a trial work period lets someone attempt employment without immediate loss of benefits; SSA evaluates monthly earnings against an SGA threshold; and beneficiaries must report work and functional changes. The reporting obligation is core—because SSA relies on beneficiaries’ updates between continuing disability reviews, false statements or silence in the face of material changes can drive improper payments and, in willful cases, rise to fraud. SSA’s own oversight record shows that most SGA-related errors arise from failures to report work promptly; persistent, intentional misrepresentation is a smaller but high-priority subset for criminal referral.

Placed against that framework, the conduct the jury credited in the Stankovits case—asserting severe sitting and lifting limits, claiming abandonment of skiing, and simultaneously engaging in regular work and ski travel—implicates both the substantive entitlement criteria and the ongoing duty to correct prior statements. That is why the government characterized the behavior as “incompatible” with the asserted limitations and why a wire fraud theory, tying electronic benefit payments to a fraudulent scheme, was viable.

Why the sentence looks short—and why the case still deters

For the lay reader, a year-and-a-day prison sentence for a six-figure fraud may seem modest. But disability-fraud sentences vary widely with loss calculations, guideline adjustments, criminal history, restitution capacity, and judicial assessment of mitigation. The day beyond a year is meaningful; it makes the sentence eligible for good-time credit in federal custody. Restitution orders and supervised release conditions extend accountability well beyond the custodial term. More broadly, the public record of conviction, professional fallout, and financial judgment carry substantial deterrent weight in a field where most violators assume their cases are too small or too complex to detect.

Comparative cases in other districts reflect similar patterns: when prosecutors can marry a clear misrepresentation record to banked benefit flows, wire fraud and false statements are the charging backbone. The message is not that any work triggers prosecution; it is that sustained deceit about functional capacity and earnings does, particularly when the narrative contradicts physical activities that are easy to corroborate—travel itineraries, season-pass records, employer files, and digital communications.

Takeaways for beneficiaries, employers, and professionals

For beneficiaries, the lesson is clarity and candor. If you try working, report it immediately, track earnings against SSA’s thresholds, and document medical changes accurately. The system provides on-ramps and off-ramps—trial work periods, extended eligibility, and timely reviews—designed to avoid exactly the kind of overpayment spiral that ends in court. For employers, particularly in small, physically demanding businesses, keep clean records and avoid informal arrangements that tempt nondisclosure; they are discoverable and can implicate you as a witness or worse. For clinicians and representatives, precision in functional assessments and insistence on client reporting can prevent misstatements from hardening into fraud exposure.

The broader integrity picture

SSA and its Office of Inspector General allocate scarce enforcement resources to cases that send a program-integrity signal. Historically, a significant share of improper payments relate to work-activity reporting failures, with criminal referrals reserved for willful schemes. Congress has reinforced the architecture—criminal penalties, civil monetary penalties, and administrative sanctions—to preserve legitimacy in a program that depends on public trust as much as actuarial math. The Stankovits case sits firmly in that design: a documented, years-long pattern of misrepresentation, a clean narrative for a jury to parse, and a sentence paired with restitution to rebalance the ledger.