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The government handed out more than $10 billion in overpayments from the food stamp program last year, according to an audit Friday that shows the end of the pandemic has done little to bring down high fraud rates.
The Agriculture Department, which runs the program, said more than 10% of all payouts were overpayments. Another 1.6% were underpayments, for a total error rate of nearly 12%.
Given the program’s size, the overpayments work out to $10 billion, congressional Republicans said.
“The level of erroneous payments remains shockingly high,” said House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glen Thompson, Pennsylvania Republican, and Sen. John Boozman, the top Republican on the Senate agriculture committee. “We are far removed from the pandemic, and it should no longer be used as a crutch.”
The Biden administration said overpayments aren’t necessarily fraud, though some of that is included in the rate.
Food stamps, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, are administered by the states but funded by the federal government.
And there was a massive range of performances at the state level in fiscal 2023.
Alaska had an overpayment rate of 60%. New Jersey scored 33%. But Vermont, South Dakota and Idaho all clocked in at a less than 3% overpayment rate and a total improper payment rate of less than 4%. That includes underpayments.
The administration blamed states for the high rates and said something must be done.
“We cannot tolerate high error rates in a program that impacts millions of lives. States must take immediate action to improve the accuracy of SNAP payments — or they will face financial penalties,” said Cindy Long, administrator for the Food and Nutrition Service.
She said the worst states will have to submit corrective plans and can face penalties for successive bad years.
The Republicans, though, said it’s not enough to blame states. They said federal bureaucrats need to do more to root out bad spending.
Last year’s rate is the worst overpayment rate in records dating to 2003.
The situation was at its best under President Obama, when the overpayment rate dipped to less than 3%. It hovered between 5% and 6% in the Trump administration, then soared to 9.8% in 2022 and just over 10% in 2023.
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