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Mahoning County fights food assistance fraud
YOUNGSTOWN
Mahoning County collected more than $162,000 in restitution last year for overpaid food-assistance benefits, a state official said Wednesday.
That puts the county among the top 20 percent of Ohio’s counties in such collections, said Michelle Thompson, a fraud control specialist with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services in Cleveland.
Mahoning County beneficiaries received $66.6 million in food assistance, known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, last year.
“Public-assistance fraud is not a victimless crime. Public-assistance fraud truly does cost everyone,” Thompson said.
Thompson spoke at a forum at Oakhill Renaissance Place in observance of May as Public Assistance Fraud Awareness Month. The event was sponsored by the county’s Department of JFS.
Statewide, ODJFS disbursed about $2.6 billion in SNAP benefits, about $280 million in Ohio Works First cash assistance and some $570 million in child-care subsidies last year.
People who lie or make misleading statements on benefit applications account for a tiny fraction of total disbursements, she said.
However, she said: “Even the smallest of fraud cases are taken very seriously by the state.”
Assistance for those found to be committing fraud is cut off, and they must re-pay benefits they’ve improperly obtained and may face criminal charges, she said.
For the first food-assistance fraud offense, the beneficiary is disqualified from the program for one year. Disqualification is for two years for the second offense and permanent for the third offense, Thompson said.
Disqualifications follow beneficiaries who move from state to state, she said. “It is in a nationwide system that they’re disqualified,” she added.
Traffickers in $500 or more in food-assistance benefits are permanently disqualified, she noted.
The electronic card system for SNAP benefits makes fraud detection much easier than it was under the old system of paper food coupons, said Randy Battistoni, a Cleveland-based special agent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is the national sponsor of SNAP.
“All of those transactions are things that can be seen with the electronic systems that are in place on the Ohio Direction Card,” he said.
Under the electronic card system, “I can go back six years and immediately get a result” of food cards used at an establishment and the volume of transactions and perform an analysis of the food card activity there, he explained. “There are different programs out there that we use to kind of analyze that store in comparison to other stores, and to decide: ‘Is there a problem?’”