Opinion: SNAP fraud in California
And you thought California’s $32 billion in Employment Development Department fraud was bad.
So how is it that they managed to siphon off EBT card numbers and pins with alarming ease? First, the United States Department of Agriculture, which implements the SNAP program, has no incentive to prevent fraud. Like the EDD debacle, these bureaucrats seem completely content to just shovel money out the door with no regard for consequences.
Consider the magnitude of these losses. SNAP boasts an annual budget of a staggering $127 billion. If estimates suggesting that 20% of this amount is lost to fraud are anywhere close to being accurate, it means $33.4 billion vanishing into thin air every year. Rather than deploying those billions toward helping America’s most needy families, SNAP is in fact one of the largest funders of organized criminal groups in the world.
To restore integrity to our public assistance programs taxpayers should demand the immediate implementation of front-end identity verification, advanced point-of-sale systems that generate transaction records, mandating the collection of transaction-specific geolocation information, and enforcing rigorous security standards for EBT transactions. To make this happen, we must upgrade the technology of EBT cards to include chips, similar to that on credit cards.
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