JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service announced Thursday an effort to prevent fraud and waste in its nutritional programs, including the $80 billion food stamp program.
This comes weeks after Jacksonville police cracked a ring that was paying people 50 cents on the dollar for their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits -- what most of us call food stamps -- prompting News4Jax to take a closer look at public assistance fraud.
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“Where protection of taxpayer dollars is concerned, the job is never done,” acting Deputy Undersecretary Brandon Lipps said. "Today, we are renewing our commitment to ensuring that our nutrition programs are run as effectively and efficiently as possible; increasing program integrity while maintaining the nutrition safety net for those truly in need.”
Lipps said he would create a new position, chief integrity officer, to manage oversight, improvements and overall integrity strategy. This position will oversee integrity initiatives in all 15 federal feeding and nutrition programs the USDA administers.
In addition, an independent, third-party review of the agency's integrity efforts will be conducted across the agency’s nutrition programs. This comprehensive review will support the identification of improvements to the process currently in place, as well as explore the implementation of promising practices across government and the private sector.
"We will continue to improve operations and outcomes in close collaboration with its state and local partners to combat waste, fraud, and abuse and best serve our participants and American taxpayers,” Lipps said.
In addition to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called food stamps, the USDA administers the nation's school breakfast and lunch programs, a summer food program and several other food assistance programs.
Governments battle food stamp fraud
The USDA's SNAP program provides essential food to just under 44 million low-income Americans, the majority of whom are women and children. The size of the program nearly doubled as the unemployment rate soared during the Great Recession triggered by the real estate crash of 2008.
The size of the program has made it an even bigger target of conservatives, and fraud like the 198 people accused of being involved in $3.7 million in fraudulent SNAP transactions in Jacksonville's "Operation Half Back" drew the ire of many -- including every food stamp recipient News4Jax interviewed.
The government has fought public assistance fraud for decades, and reports abuse of benefits are dropping.
A June 2016 government Accountability Office report found that fraud, overpayments and underpayments in all assistance programs -- including Medicare, Medicaid, military benefits, SNAP and other programs -- cost federal and state governments about $136.7 billion in 2015. That's just under 5 percent of the $2.8 trillion spent in assistance overall.
A January 2017 USDA audit of 21 months of 1.56 billion transactions by 243,595 SNAP retailers found the rate of fraud was less than 1.5 percent. But that still amounted to just over $1 billion.
Unfortunately, there are criminals who continue to attempt to fraudulently obtain benefits for themselves or others. Offenders not only lose their benefits for anywhere from a year to the rest of their lives, if the transaction is for $200 or more, it's a felony.
LINK: Report public assistance fraud to Florida DCF
States, which administer the federal program, help fight such fraud.
Mississippi enacted a law last April requiring the state to hire a private contractor to create a new computer system to review and more frequently check the eligibility of people participating in Medicaid and the food stamp program. Ohio and Wyoming enacted similar laws last year and were under consideration in Missouri and Oklahoma.
This week, West Virginia's governor signed a bill that will food-stamp able-bodied recipients between ages 18 and 49 to work at least 20 hours a week to qualify. One in five residents of the state receive SNAP benefits.
The recent proposals follow model legislation drafted by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Jacksonville-based nonprofit that favors free-market principles. Jonathan Ingram, the foundation's vice president of research, said that the goal is to preserve finite government resources by ensuring that only eligible people are receiving benefits.
With only a handful of these programs newly instituted, News4Jax was not able to find data of their effectiveness in reducing fraud.