Louisville, Kentucky (AP) – Single mother who relied on Federal Food Aid She lost her benefits in 2020 after Kentucky investigators concluded they committed the fraud.
The state claimed she made multiple same-day purchases, attempting to overdraw her accounts several times, entering some invalid pins, and sometimes making unlikely “all dollars” purchases during a typical grocery run.
An explanation was given by a woman from Appalachian Sallyersville, Kentucky. She worked in the store. She occasionally bought lunch there and got groceries after work. Her kids sometimes use her cards.
The administrative hearing officer drove her away. Supplementary Nutrition Support Program (SNAP) Anyway, it’s based solely on suspicious shopping patterns. She sued and won.
“It’s Draconians to take snap merit from single mothers without clear and compelling evidence that intentional and persuasive evidence was occurring at a time when food shortages were very common,” Franklin County Judge Thomas Wingate said in a 2023 decision.
Surge in disqualification
The past five years, Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services It has led to hundreds of fraud cases that rely heavily on transaction data with the goal of revoking the benefits of people’s food.
Judges, lawyers and legal experts said in interviews and court documents that there was little evidence of such evidence. Kentucky Public Radio has reviewed administrative hearing decisions and court documents over the past five years. Over the last five years, the Cabinet has relied on shopping patterns to prove that people have been “trafficked” or sold.
According to the latest federal data from 2023, Kentucky is so aggressive in disqualifying it from SNAP’s profits that it makes the state second only after Florida.
Records obtained by Kentucky Public Radio show that over the past decade, Kentucky’s disqualification has risen from under 100 in 2015 to over 1,800, to over 1,800.
Another Franklin County judge in 2023 ordered ministers to suspend disqualification of individuals based solely on transaction data, but since the decision, at least three cases have alleged that health agencies have continued to file such cases.
Transactional data alone cannot be used to commit fraud or to indicate the actual outcome of an individual transaction.
Faced with punishment, recipients are pressured to abandon their hearing
Kentucky will receive notification of suspected activity via mailed letters. There, you are asked to voluntarily waive your right to hear and automatically accept the punishment. In the first violation, it is generally a one-year snap ban. They also need to repay the full amount the state says they misuse.
In many cases, these cases involve relatively small amounts of money. Records show that since 2022, more than 900 people have been kicked off for less than $1,000 in “trafficking” or misuse. The claimed minimum was 14 cents.
The state has been leaning heavily towards an administrative hearing exemption since 2015, and by 2023, almost a quarter of all disqualifications had been through waiver. Some lawsuits allege that individuals do not fully understand the outcome of the exemption and were encouraged to sign by staff.
Public Radio in Kentucky has reviewed more than 20 cases since 2020, which criticised human trafficking using only spending patterns, despite participants’ rejection or lack of response.
Kendra Steele, spokesman Cabinets for Health and Family Servicesrefused to schedule an interview with Cabinet officials after multiple requests. In an email, Steele said he admitted that “we’ve ever” had brought trafficking cases based solely on transaction data, and that it was not sufficient to prove their intentions.
In response to another question, Steele writes an investigation into allegations of fraud, and consists of examining income, living conditions and “payments indicative of human trafficking.” She did not show how any of these factors could be used to prove an intentional misuse or sale of SNAP benefits, or how it differed from relying on transactional data, which is essentially a pattern of spending. Steele said in another email that he would also interview vendors and Snap recipients.
“It’s our fellow Kentuckians who are hungry.”
Approximately four out of 25 Kentuckians suffer from food insecurity, according to the Associated Press analysis of the US Census Bureau and supply of US data. This is similar to the national rate of around 14%.
USDA does that Stop collecting and releasing statistics on food anxiety Since October, on September 20th, the numbers have been “overly politicized.” This decision will be made after that Federal Funding Reductions for Food and Nutrition Safety Net Programs Nationwide.
In last fiscal year, one in eight people in Kentucky benefited from SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. Food insecurity in rural Kentucky is even more severe, making legal representatives difficult to obtain.
“The people who benefit from these programs are some of the people we need to support most in this country,” Dodds said. “It is our fellow Kentuckians who are hungry as a result of unfounded allegations of waste, fraud and abuse.”
The Cabinet has denied the KPR request for case notes on individual fraud accusations beginning in early 2024. However, the administrative hearing decisions reviewed by KPR between 2020 and 2023 included evidence that the Cabinet had relied on. Hearing officers will frequently say that people have trafficked their interests based on shopping patterns the state deemed suspicious.
Experts say officials are overreaching about purchase data
Legal experts across the country who specialize in SNAP access say that excessive reliance on transaction data is not unique to Kentucky. Transaction data was originally intended as a tool to identify potential fraud cases, according to David Super, a law professor at Georgetown.
He has been studying Snap’s disqualification for decades and has seen many cases of people who believe that transactional data is misunderstood as direct evidence of fraud, rather than asking the state for witnesses, affidavits, video evidence and plea bargain cases.
In the compiled 2023 state administrative hearing decision, hearing officers determined that a woman from the city of Mackey in eastern Kentucky had trafficked her profits as she made eight consecutive transactions in a year. The decision also said she checked her balance several times, made some inadequate fund attempts and mistyped her PIN number several times.
She lost Snap benefits for a year. In the appeal, the woman said she had recently discovered she was pregnant, saying she had two children in the state.
“Everyone has to forget to get something and go back to the store and get it,” she wrote, defending her successive purchases.
She had another hearing, but the results remained unchanged.
Cabinet officials cross-tested that back-to-back transactions and all-dollar purchases were not prohibited under the snap rules in the 2023 case. Also, the recipient is not said to be that the cabinet considers them suspicious.
But all of this is used as evidence (sometimes only evidence) that a person has misused his or her own interests.
Christy Goff, a legal aid lawyer for Appalred in Prestonsburg, southeastern Kentucky, declined last year but saw many of these cases.
“If I did it, my clients were unable to give a completely reasonable explanation of those transactions and it wasn’t human trafficking,” Goff said. “There is no receipt. There is no video footage showing someone doing something wrong. It’s just numbers written on paper.”
While saying that purchase history is insufficient to prove human trafficking, Kentucky examiners have stopped requiring the state to change how employees train or conduct SNAP investigations.
The state training materials focus almost entirely on purchasing patterns
In response to the open record request, Cabinet provided KPR with documents that will be used to train investigators on intentional program violations. They appear to discuss transaction data almost exclusively, including back-to-back payments, large transactions, and full-dollar purchase surveys.
In 2020, a Michigan appeal judge determined that transaction data alone was not sufficient to prove that a business or person had misused the benefits of snaps.
Dodds believes it should be the standard for all states, including Kentucky.
He is in the early stages of systematically reviewing decisions for thousands of SNAP benefits between 2020 and 2023. Data from around 700 decisions in 2020 alone already shows that many Kentuckians were denied benefits before the state considered real evidence of guilt.
“Maybe there are a few cases where there’s real evidence that they did something wrong,” Dodds said. “It was when she was actively trying to sell her benefits while a woman was making a call with the hearing officer. However, cases with non-trade data are very rare.”
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Associated Press Data Journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
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This report is part of a series called seeding elasticity; collaboration “While Non-Profit News Institute” Country News Network And the Associated Press focused on how rural U.S. communities are navigating the issue of food insecurity. Nine nonprofit newsrooms were involved in the series. beacon, Capital b, Use Latin NC, Investigating the Midwest, Jefferson County Beacon, Cosplay, Public Media in Louisville, Main monitor and Minpost. The Rural News Network is funded by the likes of the Google News Initiative and the Knight Foundation.
The Associated Press School of Health Sciences is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institution’s Department of Science and Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. AP is solely responsible for all content.
