Your tax dollars:
And, of course the push is on by the Obama Administration to get that guard against fraud dumped real quick. I notice that the four states with the highest food stamp useage, who do fingerprinting, are also four huge immigrant population states.
Apparently the policy of requiring fingerprints deters some people from applying; doesn’t that say something! From the NY Times:
At a time when food stamp enrollment is soaring in the city and across the nation — to the point where one New Yorker out of five takes part in the federal nutrition program — advocates have continued to raise questions about New York City’s requirement that food stamp applicants be fingerprinted.
The advocates assert that the requirement — intended to help prevent fraud — deters some needy people from applying because they are put off by fingerprinting, which many consider intrusive. Betsy Gotbaum, the public advocate, has called the requirement “a very expensive failure.”
New York, Texas, California and Arizona, which together have more than a quarter of all food stamp recipients nationwide, all have the fingerprinting requirement. Studies by the Agriculture Department have found that the fingerprinting rules do not necessarily reduce error or fraud, and may reduce food stamp participation rates — a fact that the critics say means the requirement should be discarded.
Refugee use of food stamps is on the rise. However, much to my great consternation the Office of Refugee Resettlement is way behind in its legally required annual reports to Congress. We have now finished FY 2009 and the most recent ORR report is from 2007, here. Nonetheless, the figures BEFORE the recession indicate refugee food stamp use was already increasing from 33.5% in 2002 to 49.3% in 2007. I wonder if the foot-dragging on getting out the next reports is because the numbers for employment and public assistance useage are horrible.