State Receives Grant To Fight Food Stamp Fraud

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Thad Cochran (R-Miss) today announced that the Mississippi Department of Human Services and Mississippi State University have been granted more than $1.9 million to help combat waste, fraud, and abuse of a key U.S. Department of Agriculture nutrition program.

With this grant funding, the Mississippi Department of Human Services will team with Mississippi State University to develop and install an Early Detection and Fraud Investigation Management System to analyze patterns of fraud within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which will assist investigators as they search for instances of abuse.

“This funding in an important step toward our goal of minimizing benefit fraud and improving efficiency in the SNAP program.  We wrote provisions into the 2014 farm bill to improve this nutrition program by specifically targeting trafficking, fraud and misuse,” said Cochran.

“I am very pleased that Mississippi State University and our state government will be able to take the lead in this effort, which could benefit the entire nation,” he said.

Federal law requires the state agencies administering the SNAP program to maintain fraud prevention efforts and investigate violations by program participants.  The $1,917,127 competitive grant to Mississippi is designed to help states deploy new technology to monitor and track investigations of individuals suspected of intentional program violations.  In addition, the partnership will develop statistical models to identify potential fraud and prioritize investigations.

Cochran serves as the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and as a senior member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, both of which have jurisdiction over the SNAP program.

The 2014 farm bill, which Cochran helped write, was written to stop lottery winners from continuing to receive assistance, increase program efficiency, crack down on trafficking, fraud and misuse, and invest in new pilot programs to help people secure employment through job training and other services.  SNAP savings are reached without removing anyone from the program, and will ensure that every person receives the benefits they are intended to receive.

In addition to Mississippi, the USDA awarded FY2015 SNAP Recipient Integrity Information Technology Grants to Alaska, Maine, Nevada, and New Jersey.