WASHINGTON — For Elizabeth Hugee, a single, stay-at-home mother who has a child with special needs, the $200 she receives each month in food stamps keep her family from running out of food. And she knows the rules of what she’s allowed to buy and what is off-limits because those rules could cost her the benefits or even permanent disqualification from the food stamp program.
“There are certain things that you can and can’t get with it,” said Hugee, a 50-year-old Washington resident who has been receiving food stamps – formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition assistance Program – for three years.
Hugee is one of 45 million low-income people, who depend on SNAP, the nation’s largest nutrition assistance program. The percentage of people getting food stamps erroneously is relatively low, but House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conway said Wednesday that the cost of the errors or fraud is more than $2 billion a year.
His committee was investigating whether the Department of Agriculture is doing enough to reduce food stamp fraud or trafficking, the illegal sale or purchase of benefits for cash. In 2015, states conducted about 723,000 investigations, resulting over 46,500 disqualifications for recipient fraud.
Jessica Shahin of the Agriculture Department’s Food and Nutrition Services told the committee that her agency has centralized its retailer management functions to better target the greatest risks, adopted data analytics and upgraded its alert system to better detect suspicious SNAP redemptions. The agency, she said, has also adopted predictive analytics, which can be paired with data on retailer disqualifications and excessive card replacements to target those most likely to traffic.
But Kay Brown of Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, said GAO studies have found that the U.S. Department of Agriculture tools for detecting fraud are of limited use, the USDA’s guidance on recipients who requested multiple SNAP cards did not necessarily help states detect fraud and states are not submitting reliable data on anti-fraud activities due to unclear reporting guidance.
In addition to clients who deliberately violate and compromise the integrity of the program, administrative errors occur when administrating the funds.
“Since 1977, USDA’s quality control system has provided an estimate of SNAP benefits that were paid either in the wrong amounts or to persons not eligible to receive them,” Brown said. “In recent years, this snap error rate has been on a mostly downward trend and has reached all-time lows. However (the Office of Management and Budget) still considers SNAP a high error program because it is so large even a 3.7 percent error rate in 2014 resulted in $2.6 billion in improper payments.”