SAN DIEGO, California — A former police officer from El Cajon has pleaded guilty in federal court to keeping nearly $300,000 in government benefits that kept flowing for almost a decade after the man entitled to them had died. Ivan Alonso Rodriguez, 47, pleaded guilty on November 3, 2026, to receipt, concealment and retention of stolen public money, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California announced. In his plea agreement, Rodriguez admitted he never reported the 2016 death of a former coworker — a man who had trusted him with power of attorney over his affairs — and converted the dead man's Social Security and federal retirement payments to his own use from May 2016 through September 2025.
The two men had worked together as police officers at the Naval Base San Diego Security Department, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. The coworker, identified in court documents only by the initials R.J.W., retired from that work. What turned a colleague's trust into a federal case was what R.J.W. arranged in 2013, and what Rodriguez admitted doing — and not doing — after R.J.W.'s death in Baja California, Mexico, in 2016.
The trust arrangement from 2013
In his plea agreement, Rodriguez admitted that in 2013 R.J.W. designated him as the sole trustee of his living trust, gave Rodriguez power of attorney over his affairs, and added him as a co-signatory to the bank account into which R.J.W. was receiving retirement benefit payments from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Those arrangements — an ordinary way for a retiree to make sure a trusted person can manage his money — also meant that when R.J.W. died, the person positioned to know about the death, and to keep the account running, was Rodriguez.
2016: a death in Baja California that was never reported
In 2016, R.J.W. died in Baja California, according to the plea agreement as summarized by the U.S. Attorney's Office. Rodriguez admitted that despite receiving news of the death, he did not report it to either the government or the bank. Because the death was never reported, the Social Security Administration and the Office of Personnel Management continued to make the payments intended to benefit R.J.W. — payments that, the U.S. Attorney's Office said, would otherwise have ceased at the time of his death.
The money kept coming for more than nine years. From May 2016 through September 2025, Rodriguez received more than $200,000 in Social Security Retirement Insurance Benefits, $85,000 in Federal Employees Retirement System benefits paid through OPM, and $3,200 in Economic Impact Payments — the pandemic-era federal payments — all of it intended to benefit R.J.W., according to the announcement. Rodriguez admitted in the plea agreement that he converted this stolen public money to his own use and benefit. The three figures together come to more than $288,000, which the U.S. Attorney's Office described as almost $300,000.
The charge, the agencies and the court
Rodriguez pleaded guilty to one count of receipt, concealment, and retention of stolen public money under Title 18, United States Code, Section 641. The case number is 26-CR-04295-JO. The investigating agency was the Social Security Administration's Office of the Inspector General, which investigates fraud against Social Security programs, and the case is being prosecuted by Special Assistant United States Attorney Jeffrey D. Hill. The same guilty plea was announced separately by the SSA Office of Inspector General, which is the standard channel through which benefit-fraud cases of this kind are made public.
Retirement benefits from Social Security and OPM are meant to stop when the beneficiary dies. When a death happens outside the United States — here, in Baja California — and the person who knows about it does not tell the agencies or the bank, the payments can continue automatically into the same account. That is the gap this case ran through for more than nine years, and it is why the SSA Inspector General treats death-reporting failures by trustees and account co-signatories as a distinct fraud category.
What happens next
Rodriguez is scheduled to be sentenced on February 12, 2027, at 8:30 a.m. before U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta in San Diego. The maximum penalty for the offence is ten years in prison and a fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss from the offence, whichever is greater, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. A guilty plea does not itself set the sentence: the judge will decide it at the February hearing. The announcement did not state a restitution figure; any order to repay the money would normally be addressed at sentencing, and Awaaz Punjab will report it when the court rules.
Why this matters beyond one account
For readers, the case is a plain-language warning about a fraud pattern that depends on paperwork, not force: a trusted trustee, a shared bank account, and a death that nobody reported. It is also the kind of case — a former law-enforcement officer, a fellow officer's retirement money, and nine years of payments — that federal prosecutors publicise precisely because benefit agencies cannot easily detect an unreported death abroad on their own. Families with elderly relatives receiving U.S. benefits outside the country should note the practical point in the plea: a death must be reported to the Social Security Administration and to OPM, and a power of attorney does not entitle the holder to keep payments after the beneficiary dies.