Food Stamp Program Certification Costs and Errors, 1989-2005: Final Report

Christopher Logan, Ryan Kling and William Rhodes

No 292020, Contractor and Cooperator Reports from United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service

Abstract: Preventing and detecting certification errors in the Food Stamp Program (FSP) is a major policy concern. In 2005, the cost of overpayments was $1.29 billion, about 4.5 percent of the $28.6 billion in benefits issued. This report examines the State-level relationships between FSP certification error rates and certification expenditures, program policies, caseload characteristics, and economic conditions. The results show that, during the study period of 1989- 2005, a 10-percent increase in certification “effort”—about $35 per participating household—would reduce an index of certification errors by 2 percent (0.3 percentage points out of a mean of 15.1 percent). The effect of certification effort was significantly smaller between 1997 and 2002, when States were implementing welfare reform. Key simplification policies authorized by the 2002 Farm Bill were estimated to jointly reduce the error index by 4.4 percentage points.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Financial Economics; Food Security and Poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 118
Date: 2008-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/292020/files/ccr-45.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:uerscc:292020

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.292020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Contractor and Cooperator Reports from United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().