Special program for food security

Tobit regression analysis was used to examine the determinants of poverty, pooling together data for both beneficiary and non-beneficiary households. Altogether data from households collected through a multi-stage random sampling procedure was used for analysis. The figure included 52 beneficiary households and 52 non-beneficiary households. Data was collected on socio-economic variables including age, household size, educational attainment, ownership of assets among others.

The nonbeneficiary households showed a greater multidimensional poverty depth than their beneficiary counterparts with an Average Multidimensional Poverty Index AMPI of 0. Most SNAP eligibility rules apply to all households, but there are some special rules for households with elderly or disabled members that are described here. If your household does not have elderly or disabled members, you should read the general SNAP eligibility rules. The information presented here is for Oct.

Your household must meet certain requirements to be eligible for SNAP and receive benefits. If your state agency determines that you are eligible to receive SNAP benefits, you will receive benefits back to the date you submitted your application.

You must apply for SNAP in the state where you currently live. Because each state has a different application form and process, a member of your household must contact your state agency directly to apply. Some states have online applications that can be completed from the state agency website.

If you are unable to go to your local SNAP office or do not have access to the internet, you may have another person act as an authorized representative by applying and being interviewed on your behalf. You must designate the authorized representative in writing. Note: Please contact your SNAP state agency directly to apply and to request information about the status of your application.

FNS does not process applications or have access to case information. In most cases, once you submit your application, your state agency or local SNAP office will process it and send you a notice telling you whether or not you are eligible for benefits within 30 days.

During the 30 days, you will need to complete an eligibility interview and give proof verification of the information you provided. The interview is typically completed over the telephone or in-person.

If you are found eligible, you will receive benefits based on the date you submitted your application. You may be eligible to receive SNAP benefits within 7 days of your application date if you meet additional requirements.

Contact your state agency for additional details. Benefits are automatically loaded into your account each month. You can use your EBT card to buy groceries at authorized food stores and retailers. If you are found eligible, you will receive a notice that tells you how long you will receive SNAP benefits for; this is called your certification period.

Before your certification period ends, you will receive another notice that says you must recertify to continue receiving benefits. Your local SNAP office will provide you with information about how to recertify.

Everyone who lives together and purchases and prepares meals together is grouped together as one SNAP household. Some people who live together, such as spouses and most children under age 22, are included in the same SNAP household, even if they purchase and prepare meals separately.

If a person is 60 years of age or older and unable to purchase and prepare meals separately because of a permanent disability, the person and the person's spouse may be a separate SNAP household if the others they live with do not have very much income no more than percent of the poverty level. Normally you are not eligible for SNAP benefits if an institution gives you most of your meals. However, there is one exception for elderly persons and one for disabled persons:.

Vehicles count as a resource for SNAP purposes. States determine how vehicles may count toward household resources. Licensed vehicles are also subject to an equity test, which is the fair market value less any amount owed on the vehicle. The following vehicles are excluded from the equity test:. In practice, requiring adjustment for small changes in income is administratively inefficient. Adjustments to changes less than those amounts occur periodically when eligibility is reassessed.

Benefit amounts are either standardized or calculated automatically based on a standard shelter and medical expense deduction. As of mid , 11 states were operating CAP s in some locations. Although the federal government pays most FSP costs and sets most of the regulations, the program is operated by states, generally through local welfare offices. This "quality control" QC sample is sufficiently large to provide reliable information on the people receiving food stamps, the rate at which administrators make errors in benefit determination, and the amounts of payments involved.

States can be charged for the benefit cost of error rates in excess of national averages. In practice such penalties are often waived; when enforced, states pay by investing the fine penalty in programs to improve performance. The QC system creates incentive for promoting accurate collection of data on income, including SSI receipt. States can and do check on SSI status by using the Social Security Administration's State Data Exchange program to investigate benefit status for all members of applicant households.

Important questions include:. We use two data sources for this analysis. The first is unpublished tabulations of administrative data on SSI receipt from administrative files provided by the Social Security Administration. Department of Agriculture Poikolainen and Ewell The FSPQC Database for each year contains a rich set of demographic, economic, and FSP eligibility and benefit information on a nationally representative probability sample of approximately 49, recipient households.

The sample is collected throughout the 12 months and therefore differs from a simple single month cross section. Our analysis excludes California because of the cash-out. Over the — interval, California accounted for The data for each year are separately tabulated by SSI recipient age group.

The SSI recipient counts in the first row for each group are from Social Security administrative records and are averages for the months of the fiscal year. These are exact counts of payments made. Thus we estimate see the age group at the bottom of the table that , elderly SSI recipients lived in FSP recipient households in ; this was Although the denominators for these statistics are from administrative data and are effectively known with certainty, the FSP recipient counts are sample based and therefore subject to sampling errors.

However, since the samples are quite large, confidence intervals around the sample-based recipient estimates are small, so the precision of the prevalence estimates is high. Table 2 supports a number of inferences. One is that utilization of food stamps is not universal among households that include SSI recipients. However, these data do not reveal the extent to which nonparticipation reflects household ineligibility or failure to take advantage of a benefit to which the household is entitled.

A second inference is that in general, child SSI recipients are less likely to live in FSP households than are adults, and elderly SSI recipients are more likely to receive food stamps than others. Perhaps the most significant discovery is that the prevalence of food stamp receipt grew substantially over the — interval, with the largest increases occurring in the last 2 years.

Because the FSP benefit is nationally uniform with the exception of Hawaii and Alaska , it would be reasonable to expect that the prevalence of food stamp receipt would be lower in states with a substantial SSI supplement than in states without.

However, separate calculation of FSP prevalence in states grouped by size of supplement revealed no clear pattern. For the elderly, living in a high supplement state is associated with higher, not lower, prevalence of food stamp receipt. For children, the opposite is true.

It may be that the effect of high benefits is offset by high living costs. On average, housing costs—the key component of interstate variation in costs of living—are positively correlated with the presence and amount of the SSI state supplement. Next, we turn to the contribution of FSP benefits to household income.

For this purpose we continue separate analysis by age and further differentiate between recipients living alone or with spouses only and SSI recipients living with others. Table 3 provides a sense of the reliability of estimates for various subgroups by reporting sample sizes and the estimated number of SSI recipients the sum of sample weights for various subgroups in Some of the subgroups are so small singles under age 18 living alone, married recipients under age 18 living with spouse, and married persons over age 64 living with others that the results are meaningless.

However for subgroup samples that are large, results can be viewed with considerable confidence. For each subgroup we report average income and benefit sources plus, on the right-hand side, three measures of the increment to resources provided by the FSP. The second increment measure Across households: Ratio of food stamp benefit to total household income—mean is the average across SSI recipients of the ratio of the household's food stamp benefit to household cash income.

This measure is an "average of ratios," as opposed to the first measure, which is a "ratio of averages. We include estimated standard errors for this mean. Consider single working-age SSI adult recipients who live alone. We estimate that in there were slightly more than 1 million 1,, people in this group. About one-third Very few—4 percent—had earned income. The FSP increased current income in aggregate for this group by The median of the increment distribution is 12 percent.

Thus in contrast to the very modest 2. For couples, the increment is not 5. The largest increment is found for SSI recipients living in households with others. Cases like this include child SSI recipients living with single mothers, single mother recipients living with children who are supported by TANF, and elderly adults living with a child. For SSI recipients living in households with others, the average increment is over 20 percent.

By all measures, we find that the FSP benefit is important. Table 4 presents the results of repeating the first of the increment measures, the ratio of mean food stamp benefit to mean SSI recipient household income, across all six years of our data. We have excluded results for the three subgroups with very small sample sizes.

For the other subgroups the results are clear: The FSP contribution to the resources of recipient households that include SSI recipients grew over the — interval. Overall from through , the food stamp increment is estimated to have been Thus, over the — period under study, the likelihood that SSI recipients live in FSP recipient households has grown recall Table 2 , and, among those recipient households, the contribution made by the FSP has increased. As Table 3 indicates, many of these households have income from other sources.

How significant is the FSP benefit for this officially poor and "wholly dependent" group? Table 5 presents the average increment to household income created by the FSP for adults in wholly dependent households, by age and marital status. The results for the two subgroups of wholly dependent singles living alone those aged 18—64 and 65 or older do not differ much from what is reported in Table 4 because over 87 percent of single SSI recipients are wholly dependent.

For the wholly dependent married subgroups, the food stamp increment is larger than the average for those not wholly dependent. This group represents an estimated , recipients nationwide.

One-quarter of these recipients are children. The difference between the value of the FSP benefit calculated on the basis of the FBR and standard deduction alone and the much more substantial actual contribution uncovered in the FSPQC data is attributable to allowed deductions.

For SSI recipients, two deductions are likely to be important: excess medical and housing costs. The tabulations in Table 6 are divided by recipient age and living arrangements. The excess housing cost deduction is much more important than medical costs as a factor increasing the amount of the food stamp benefit Table 6.

For example, housing costs affect the food stamp benefit for This outcome may reflect the fact that most SSI recipients are eligible for Medicaid. There are nuances: The excess housing cost deduction is important for an even higher percentage of persons living with a spouse than for singles living alone, and the prevalence of the medical cost deduction is lower for the elderly than for working-age recipients. To investigate the importance of the excess housing cost deduction cap for these households, we counted the number of households where the deduction exceeds the cap.

We include as having an excess shelter deduction all persons in Combined Application Project demonstrations, because they typically include a standardized housing cost deduction. As indicated by Table 7, in FY the excess shelter deduction affects the food stamp benefit of almost 80 percent of households with SSI recipients. Seventeen percent of the SSI recipients affected by the excess housing cost deduction had an excess shelter cost that exceeded the cap applied to households without disabled or elderly members.

Again, we consider trends. Chart 2 shows the results of extending the calculation of the prevalence of effective excess housing cost deduction over time. For all groups, prevalence is greater in than in , and in all cases the difference is statistically significant. In sum, the Food Stamp Program quality control data indicate that the FSP provides benefits to at least half of all SSI recipients and that on average this contribution is a substantial increase in resources.

It is natural to ask about the status of those SSI recipients who are not currently in households using food stamps. Is it possible that a significant number of these households might be eligible? In this section we show that the evidence is mixed, but there is evidence of potential for expanding take-up among currently nonparticipating households with SSI recipients. Understanding the evidence of opportunity for increasing participation requires sufficient knowledge of how FSP participation is currently assessed.

While federally funded, the FSP is operated by states. The quality of state management varies; the FSPQC sample is in part conducted to monitor and reduce the variance in accuracy of benefit assessment, and the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of established a "high performance bonus" to reward states for "actions taken to correct errors, reduce the rates of error, improve eligibility determinations, or other activities that demonstrate effective administration as determined by USDA " Committee on Ways and Means , 15—19 ; FNS In recent years, attention has also been paid to variation across states in FSP participation rates, the ratio of recipients to persons believed to be eligible.

The Department of Agriculture estimates that nationwide only 60 percent of persons eligible for FSP in actually received benefits Cunnyngham, Castner, and Schirm , 3.

The department has announced a target national participation rate of 68 percent in FNS States varied enormously in estimated take-up rates in , from a low of 40 percent in Wyoming to a high of 95 percent in Missouri FNS , 7.

The validity of estimates of FSP take-up is open to question, and this complicates their use as a measure of comparative state performance. The numerator of the ratio—persons in FSP recipient households—comes from Social Security administrative data and is reliable, at least in aggregate. Estimates of the denominator—the FSP eligible population—are more problematic. To estimate the number of individuals, the Food and Nutrition Service uses data on annual income for households from the Current Population Survey CPS , which does not include information on all aspects of FSP eligibility requirements; some types of income are underreported, and the monthly pattern of income variation must be inferred from annual totals and other reported household characteristics, including joblessness and benefit receipt Barrett and Poikolainen , Appendix C.

For some states the CPS samples are small, so estimates of the numbers of eligible households are constructed by combining state sample data with predictions based on data from other states Cunnyngham, Castner, and Schirm Participation rate estimates are then reported with confidence intervals built around the assumptions that the imputation of eligibility is certain and uncertainty arises only from household sampling variability inherent in the CPS and FSPQC sample Barrett and Poikolainen , Appendix D.

If there is error in the eligibility imputation itself, the reported confidence intervals exaggerate the reliability of the estimates both for assessing actual take-up among eligible households in any state and for comparing performance of one state with that of others. If the estimates are accurate, by virtually every household with an SSI recipient that was FSP eligible in fact received benefits.