Inside North Carolina’s efforts to reduce SNAP payment error rates

It’s been nearly a year since President Donald Trump signed into law major changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and many states are still scrambling to implement the new rules. North Carolina has made some progress by addressing a small fix in the state’s SNAP system that could have big impacts on their overall payment error rate, experts said during a recent webinar. 

Last July, Trump signed the “Big, Beautiful Bill Act” that established new payment error rules surrounding the food assistance program, which stipulates that states with a payment error rate larger than 6% will receive less financial support from the federal government to maintain the program. 

Under the updated payment error rules, approximately 27 states could incur an annual cost shift of $100 million to their SNAP programs, said Maria Reyes-Gaskin, product manager at U.S. Digital Response, during a webinar hosted by the civic nonprofit yesterday. 

One major opportunity for states to reduce payment error rates is by implementing targeted tech and process changes that make changes or errors in client data updates easier to identify and address, said Dillon Vrosh, design and research lead at USDR.  

A change in someone’s income or housing status has to be reported and logged by a caseworker to adjust the client’s SNAP payment, but staff’s competing priorities and increasing demand on benefit programs mean it’s easy for such updates to go overlooked, Vrosh said. 

“This could basically mean that there is an error essentially sitting in a queue,” he said. “The best time to do quality assurance really is before an error becomes an actual error.” 

States can, for instance, improve the usability of their eligibility and enrollment systems to ensure the process to input or update clients’ SNAP data is clear and streamlined, Vrosh said. This doesn’t have to be a system overhaul either, he explained, as staff can “[zero] in on one section” of the overall process.

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, was able to close 2,000 erroneous SNAP cases after reviewing state data and implementing changes to the intake process, said Jill Zimmerman Lawrence, a senior advisor and Chief of Staff at North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services.  

Like many other states, North Carolina’s system changes came from leaders asking themselves, “What are the short-term solutions to our caseload, and then what are the long-term solutions to prevent issues in the future?” Lawrence said. 

NCDHHS started by taking a closer look at the state’s quality control data to assess “what that data is telling us about our errors that exist in our sample,” Lawrence said.  

Demystifying the state’s SNAP data was a critical component to begin implementing the new rules because, in North Carolina, the assistance program is state-supervised but county-administered, she said. That dynamic can create a disconnect between what state and staff across North Carolina’s 100 different counties know about how determinations are made and what data is available to make those determinations. 

NCDHHS began by reviewing its SNAP quality control data to offer county leaders clearer insights on “ what was happening [across all 100 counties] and then specifically what's happening in their county,” Lawrence said. 

The analytic team looked at the state’s raw SNAP data and found that there were many cases with multiple shelter deductions reported, which indicated that multiple rents were attached to a singular case that represented one household. 

Since SNAP payments are determined by a person’s income minus deductions for certain factors like their shelter status, some recipients were receiving overpayments due to having two or three shelter deductions on their profile, Lawrence explained. 

NCDHHS then realized that, while county staff were updating a client’s change in income or rent in the eligibility system, it “wasn’t ending the old rent, it was just applying it forward,” she said. 

Officials were able to terminate the process that allowed deductions to accumulate, leading to the closure of more than 2,000 cases that could have otherwise contributed to the state’s payment error rate, Lawrence said. State officials estimate that North Carolina could pay up to $420 million more annually, under the new SNAP rules. 

NCDHHS also implemented a system design change that now alerts a caseworker if any additional deductions are detected, prompting staff to confirm if they want to automatically close the previous deduction or if there is a reason why the extra data point exists, Lawrence explained. 

“We’ve seen that over 20,000 times, our caseworkers have used the one-click option to close an old shelter deduction,” Lawrence said. The one-click option has also helped reduce county staff’s overall administrative burden by eliminating repetitive or additional steps of the application and determination process. 

Ultimately, improving communication about SNAP data to inform new system design and protocol for county staff interacting with clients is one way state and local leaders can together solve “a problem we didn't ask for,” Lawrence said.