State reduces food stamp errors

BOISE – The state has more than halved the rate of errors caseworkers make in providing food stamps to the poor, but it may have come at the expense of creating problems in other social services.

Legislative auditors on Tuesday reported that training, monitoring and review programs implemented by the Health and Welfare Department since the auditors’ blistering report in June have cut from 15 percent to 7 percent the cases in which poor people either get too much or too little food assistance.

But the follow-up report said the rate remains above the national average and there is still a sizable number of eligible households denied any food assistance at all.

Department spokesman Ross Mason emphasized the dramatic improvements since the earlier audit, primarily due to reassigning staff from elsewhere in the department to attack the error problem.

“But the other programs that could potentially suffer from that are child support and Medicaid,” Mason said. “Any time you beef up one end, you have to take some manpower from others.

“We still haven’t eliminated the real problem here,” he said. “The problem is we don’t have enough people to handle the cases we’ve got.”

The state’s budget problems over the past three years forced manpower reductions throughout government, and the Health and Welfare Department was not immune. Sixty people were initially cut from the corps assessing eligibility. Five were added back in the current budget.

Mason said bringing the error rate down to nearly the national average has probably enabled the state to avoid a threatened federal fine of up to $1 million.

But Idaho Foodbank Director Roger Simon has said that any problems in the state’s food stamp program increase the pressure on his and similar charitable organizations, which are already coping with a tight economy that has both limited support for their efforts and increased demand for their help.

The food bank has been unable to keep up with demand, Simon said, despite disbursing millions of pounds of food through 200 agencies across Idaho every year.

During the 12 months through last June, the state averaged 90,000 households a month on food stamps. The average during the previous 12-month period was only 78,000 of the state’s nearly 500,000 households.

Mason said the trend has been steady to increasing since midsummer.

“These numbers fluctuate all the time, and they fluctuate with the economy,” he said. “If the economy’s bad, food stamps are up. It suggests to me, at this point, that the economy isn’t moving.”