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 new government data.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says nearly 10% of payments in 2022 were “overpayments,” meaning someone either got more than they deserved or got money when they shouldn’t have been getting any payment at all. Nearly 2% more were underpayments.
The numbers are the first evaluation of the program since the start of the pandemic and suggest a massive amount of waste in a program that paid out $114 billion last year.
The data also show a severe deterioration compared to 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 the new numbers aren’t all due to fraud, though it acknowledged lingering “challenges” from the pandemic that have 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 better 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’s more than twice the program’s cost in 2019, before the pandemic, when food stamp benefits cost just $55.6 billion.
The new bad-payment data were released Friday.
That 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’s an approximate guess. 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 generally had made an effort to promote accountability, internal collaboration and new technology and training.
The government first began estimating improper payments in benefit programs 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, then rose under President Donald Trump and 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%. Perhaps not surprisingly, Alaska also had the lowest rate of underpayments at 0.29%.
South Dakota did the best overall, with a less than 3% overpayment rate and an underpayment rate in the top three, at 0.39%.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.