The food stamp program was slammed with fraud and bungling during the pandemic, leading to the highest rate of “improper payments” on record last year, according to government data.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says nearly 10% of payments in 2022 were “overpayments,” meaning someone received more than they deserved or collected money when they shouldn’t have been receiving any payment at all. Nearly 2% more were underpayments.
The first evaluation since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic suggests a massive amount of waste in a program that paid out $114 billion last year.
The data also shows a severe deterioration from before the pandemic, when the government recorded a total improper payment rate — overpayments and underpayments combined — of 7.4% in 2019 and 6.8% in 2018.
The Biden administration defended the performance and insisted that fraud didn’t account for all the bad payments, though it acknowledged lingering “challenges” from the pandemic that affected operations.
“Payment errors are largely due to unintentional mistakes by either the state agency or a household that result in a state determining an applicant is eligible when they are not or incorrectly calculating a participant’s benefit amount,” the USDA said.
Officials said they are taking steps, including improving communication with states and threatening penalties for those that don’t lower their bad-payment rates.
Food stamps — officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — averaged 41.2 million beneficiaries in 2022, with an average payment of $230.24, for a total of $113.9 billion. That was more than twice the program’s cost in 2019, before the pandemic, when food stamp benefits cost just $55.6 billion.
The bad-payment numbers were released Friday.
The same day, the Government Accountability Office released a report on the broader universe of improper payments, which it said totaled $247 billion in fiscal 2022.
That guess was approximate. The government can’t “determine the full extent to which improper payments occur,” the GAO said.
The GAO said some agencies have made headway in reducing their bad-payment rates and have generally tried to promote accountability, internal collaboration, and new technology and training.
The government began estimating benefit errors after the Improper Payments Information Act of 2002 took effect.
In 2003, the first year of data under the law, the food stamp program had an error rate of 6.63%. It dipped as low as 3.2% during the Obama administration and then rose under President Trump. The rate has reached a record high under President Biden.
The exact national overpayment rate in 2022 was 9.84%. The underpayment rate was 1.7%.
The program is funded by the federal government but run by the states, which varied dramatically in their accuracy rates.
The worst was Alaska, where officials bungled more than half of all payments, with an overpayment rate of 56.69%. Alaska also had the lowest rate of underpayments at 0.29%.
South Dakota did the best overall, with an overpayment rate of less than 3% and an underpayment rate in the top three, at 0.39%.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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