CEEWB: The Future of SNAP

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Further, data from some other sources is available free for Medicaid, but states must pay for the same data again to access it for SNAP, an obviously unnecessary duplication of scarce funds. A comprehensive review of available data sources, undertaken by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) and other federal agencies would lead to rational decisions made on issues of data access, quality, and costs. Data content within the Federal Hub should be expanded to meet the needs of SNAP and other human services programs. Work Number – Work Number allows requesters, for a transactional fee, to receive immediate confirmation of an individual’s employment and salary for eligibility verification purposes. This real-time, electronic access to employment data is a critical tool to State SNAP agencies in their efforts to efficiently determine benefit eligibility while ensuring program integrity by reducing potential fraud from customer non-report. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Federal Data Services Hub was created, allowing states to access data to aid in the determination of eligibility for enrollment in qualified health plans and insurance affordability programs. The Work Number is one of the many data elements available on the Hub. Several State SNAP agencies had existing individual state contracts with the Work Number, and sought access to the Federal Data Services Hub Work Number data, thus providing them with the ability

to eliminate the duplicative money being spent on individual state contracts with the Work Number. Unfortunately, Food and Nutrition Services (FNS) released a memo providing guidance to states, explaining that the state, “should not consider information from the Hub to be verified upon receipt for SNAP purposes.” The FNS memo goes on to explain that “FNS has worked with CMS diligently…to resolve this issue” and that CMS is “actively searching for ways to resolve this challenge.” The FNS memo was released to states in October 2013, and visible progress has yet to occur; resulting in the Work Number maintaining high-cost contracts to identical data at both a state and federal level. A single national Work Number contract, available for all eligibility programs, is a simple and necessary solution to eliminate this waste of dollars seen with multi-level contracts. Information sharing among states – Pilots such as the National Accuracy Clearinghouse, which is testing a multi-state recipient database, are promising and their successful elements should be quickly made available nationwide. Similar concepts should be incorporated into a variety of other contexts where information sharing could benefit the program. Potentially helpful innovations like these demand a much higher priority and much faster timetables than we have seen to date. In addition to contributing to the modernization of SNAP, progress on this front could reduce or eliminate many of the new integrity