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Food Stamp Reforms Are Ruining Christmas

Kafkaesque efforts to cut down on food stamp fraud are just throwing money at a problem that probably wasn't that big of a deal to begin with.

Maria Melo sits at her kitchen table with stacks of unpaid bills. Photos by the author

By the time Maria Melo went to the state social services office to apply for food stamps, things had been going badly for months. She'd lost her job as director of nursing at a rehab facility. Then, longstanding problems with anxiety, depression, and an eating disorder shut her body down and she ended up hospitalized for two weeks. Between unemployment checks and her husband's work as a self-employed electrician, they might still have been able to squeak by OK and even get some decent Christmas gifts for the kids. But the unpaid hospital bills made that impossible now.

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Food stamps, Melo figured, would reduce the monthly grocery bill, giving her a little breathing room in the family budget. But, sitting in the crowded waiting room at an office of the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance near her home in Lowell, she was more embarrassed than hopeful.

"I was like, I can't believe I'm doing this," she said. "Here I am, a registered nurse, sitting there, just hoping for help."

Melo handed an intake worker the family passports, photos, and various paperwork verifying their income. After struggling with the computer system, the worker told her he'd expedite the application and she should be all set. He gave her a temporary electronic benefits card and told her to keep calling the number on the back to find out if it had been activated. By the time she got back to her car, the two hours she'd had on the meter had run out and she'd gotten a $15 ticket.

"I called my husband bawling, saying, now I have my first parking ticket, but I qualify for food stamps, so whatever," she said. "One washes out the other."

The office of the Department of Transitional Assistance in Lowell, Massachusetts, where people wait hours for food stamps that may or may not come

Over the following weeks, Melo kept calling the number to see if the funds had come through. "It just says zero balance, zero balance," she said. Finally, she went back to the office, sitting in the waiting room for another two hours before getting called up. "Then I come in and the lady goes, 'Oh, no. you haven't been approved. You're going to be getting a denial letter,'" Melo said. "I was just, like, baffled. Literally, I almost lost it on the lady."

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The DTA says it commonly hands out cards to people after an intake interview so that they can get their benefits quickly if they get approved. But Melo said she doesn't understand why, after sharing all of her family's financial information, the office initially told her she would be approved and then took it back. Although the DTA promises to send a denial letter explaining why an applicant wasn't approved immediately after the decision is made, weeks after her first visit, Melo said she still hasn't received one.

Melo is not alone. Jason Stephany, spokesman for Service Employees International Union Local 509, which represents DTA workers, said the system has struggled to process applications, due in part to a lack of manpower. "When we are short staffed by upward of 200 workers, the result has been significant delays and backlogs that are undoubtedly impacting eligibility, recertification, and those who receive benefits," he told me. "We hear from clients every day who are waiting two, three hours in the DTA offices to try to submit information, ask questions."

Talk to food stamp recipients in pretty much any state, and you'll hear the same story: Phone calls that go unreturned, benefits cut off after a form gets lost in the mail, little hassles and major mistakes that hit particularly hard because you're in a bad spot to begin with. Some of this may be unavoidable hiccups in a program serving 46 million people nationwide, but efforts in states across the country to "reform" the federal food stamp program, formally known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, seem to be making the problem worse.

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An EBT card to nowhere

In recent years, several states including Massachusetts, where Melo lives, have added photos to EBT cards in an attempt to prevent food stamp fraud. Others are trying to make applicants pee in a cup to see if they're on drugs before qualifying them for benefits. Dan Lesser, director for economic justice at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, said the intense focus on fraud is partly a result of the huge growth in food stamp use since the 2008-09 economic collapse. But he added that reform attempts are also misplaced—the SNAP program has grown at a time when many people needed it, exactly as it was designed.

There's no indication that fraud is actually a growing problem for the food stamp program. In fact, since 1993, the US Department of Agriculture, which runs SNAP, has reduced the illegal saleof food stamps from 4 percent of benefits—or 4 cents on the dollar—to just 1 percent, thanks to new electronic tracking technology.

New reform measures are unlikely to improve those numbers further, Lesser said, and add hurdles for SNAP applicants, diverting funds that might otherwise be used to streamline the application process. And a lack of resources can quickly snowball, as anxious applicants start calling state offices, forcing workers to spend more time answering the phones. "It diverts resources to wasteful purposes, and then you don't have the resources to process cases," Lesser said.

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Last year, Massachusetts became one of the first states in the country to require food stamp recipients to add photos to their EBT cards. The changes cost the state $1.5 million, and, according to a recent letter from the USDA, the transition did not go smoothly. Old cards were deactivated before new ones arrived, leaving many families without benefits for weeks, and state workers often failed to honor an exemption for elderly and disabled applicants.

"Because the state really hastily and sloppily implemented this, they did not take steps to make sure people's rights were protected," said Patricia Baker, senior policy advocate with Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. She added that some of the new cards were sent to the wrong addresses and others were apparently lost in last year's holiday mail rush. "People literally were food shopping and they found they couldn't use their cards—12,000 of them," she said.

But here's that would really get Kafka's juices going: Under federal law, anyone in an eligible household can use a SNAP card, whether or not their name or photo is on it. So adding a picture to the card isn't actually an effective way of preventing fraud at all. Practically speaking, it doesn't change anything at all.

If that seems odd to you, it's also confusing to retailers, who, in some cases have ended up turning legitimate customers away. More than a year after the start of the photo policy, Lowell resident Mary Tevepaugh said she's still having problems using the card, which was issued to her father, whom she lives and who suffers from debilitating back pain that makes it difficult for him to leave the house. "I have to go shopping for him, but they won't let me use the ID unless he's with me," she said.

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Meanwhile, Massachusetts DTA has gotten even slower at processing SNAP applications. In 2008, the state's processing efficiency was the second best in the country, with nearly 98 percent of applications completed on time (within 30 days for regular applications, or seven for expedited ones). By 2013, the number was down to 84 percent, putting Massachusetts in the bottom half of the states.

Her doctor has warned her to try to avoid stress, so she's trying not to think too much about the growing tower of bills on her counter.

This year, the DTA launched a new centralized system for processing applications that it says should get people through the process faster. But Stephany, the union spokesman, said that so far it's causing more delays, and likely leading to people unfairly having their benefits dropped.

"We're certainly seeing a backlog of tens of thousands of documents every day within the system, which has an effect on how quickly eligibility and recertifications can be processed," he said. "At the end of the day, if those documents aren't acted on in a timely manner, the cases have to be closed by federal law."

The problems in Massachusetts haven't deterred other states from pursuing similar reforms. Both Maine and Georgia began requiring photos for SNAP cards this year, and at least a dozen other states are considering doing the same. In other places, state lawmakers have proposed requiring SNAP applicants to pass drug tests. The USDA barred one such law from taking effect in Georgia, but some members of Congress are now trying to change federal law to allow it.

It's not at all clear that the policies are financial winners. A Florida program requiring recipients of cash aid get drug tested—which operated for only a few months before it was shut down—reduced benefit pay-outs by only $40,480, while costing the state $246,050.

As for Melo, she figures if her SNAP denial letter ever shows up she'll decide whether she can appeal the decision. Her doctor has warned her to try to avoid stress, so she's trying not to think too much about the growing tower of bills on her counter. And she and her husband are still trying to figure out how to make Christmas happen for their kids. Their 16-year-old daughter told them all she wants is the payment for her drivers' ed class, and even their 13-year-year-old son has said he doesn't need much.

"They're smart enough," Melo said. "They know that things are tough. Things aren't going good here."