Quality Assurance of Eligibility Determination in the U.S. Food Stamp Program

6 Quality Assurance of Eligibility Determination in the U.S. Food Stamp Program 

As the benefits provided by the U.S. Food Stamp Program are entirely federally funded but eligibility determination is handled at the local level, the federal government mandates a thorough system of quality control that it has developed to monitor and reduce errors in eligibility. 

Quality control measures the accuracy of states eligibility decisions and benefit calculations. Each month, the states randomly select a specified number of cases from two sample frames. The first is a sample of all those who were provided benefits in a given month ( active cases ). The second is a sample of those who were denied benefits or whose benefits were terminated in a given month ( negative cases ). The states review random samples of a total of some 50,000 active cases and 30,000 negative cases each year. The federal government conducts a random re-review of about 30 percent of the cases to verify that the states quality control review was conducted appropriately. 

Negative case reviews determine the share of households wrongly classified as ineligible or wrongly terminated in the total oaseload. These reviews are less rigorous and usually consist of desk reviews of eligibility caseworker records. 

The problem of excessive enrollment numbers would become acute if local jurisdictions were allowed to determine their own criteria for poverty or eligibility and receive funding for everyone who met those criteria, as this would give them incentives to set cri- 

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