State officials confirmed Thursday that 3SquaresVT, the state’s food stamp program that has been plagued by high error rates in recent years, will be penalized for the third year in a row.
The penalty for failing to accurately distribute food benefits is not a mere slap on the wrist. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the program at the national level, is expected to make the state pay its steepest fine yet: $370,000.
And it’s not just the state that feels the crunch — when the program awards too high a benefit, food stamp recipients are on the hook to pay back the excess, under federal requirements.
The USDA won’t mail out a formal notice of the fine until June, but the Department for Children and Families, which runs the state program, already knows it has once again exceeded the acceptable number of errors for fiscal year 2013.
Commissioner Dave Yacovone told lawmakers Thursday that there’s no doubt the program will face punitive action from the federal government. Vermont has been fined nearly $500,000 over the past two years.
Despite its persistently high error rate, Deputy Commissioner Richard Giddings said additional staff trainings have helped the program lower its error rate in recent months.
“For the last four months, we have continued to see decreases in our monthly error rates, which shows us that the training was effective and certainly shows us that we are moving in the right direction,” Giddings said.
In the meantime, Yacovone has a few ideas for sidestepping the penalty and reducing the impact on families, but they all depend on the discretion of the federal government.
Acting on a suggestion from officials in Maine, Yacovone plans to ask the USDA to allow Vermont to invest its $370,000 penalty into a solution for the program’s woes, rather than sending it to the federal coffers. The department has yet to work out that proposal and the USDA hasn’t made any promises, but Giddings and Yacovone said the agency has been “very supportive” of their efforts to put the program back on track.
Families only have to pay back the government if the amount they owe exceeds $400. Yacovone said he’s asked the USDA if Vermont can raise that threshold to $600. (It’s not worth the government’s while to recoup smaller amounts of money, Yacovone said.)
Households that owe more than that — some are on the hook for as much as $2,000 — would still have to pay it back. In fiscal year 2012, the average error for the 204 households at the receiving end of DCF’s overpayments was $983.
The USDA also allows states to forgive part of a family’s debt, depending on their financial situation, but families have to apply for that to happen. Yacovone said the department is discussing with the USDA whether the state could set up a system in which families could automatically have part of their debt waived.
Yacovone was not encouraging, however, about the possibility of the state’s offering a complete forgiveness to families burdened with paying back money because of the department’s errors. The USDA would be reluctant to waive that payback requirement, for fear that other states would follow suit, Yacovone said.
