BY THE NUMBERS*
The Department of Job and Family Services, the sheriff and prosecutor have been working together for a 1½ years trying to catch and punish people who commit food stamp fraud.
449: Number of complaints
94: Arrests made
90: Violators sentenced
91: Alleged or admitted drugs involved
$5.4 million: Savings to taxpayers
Source: Butler County Sheriff’s Office
*July 2012-January 2014
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
What do you think about Butler County’s efforts to crack down on people who commit food stamp fraud?
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WHAT DO YOU THINK?
What do you think about Butler County’s efforts to crack down on people who commit food stamp fraud?
Share your thoughts by emailing JNletters@coxinc.com.
If you don’t use email, you can mail your letters to: Journal-News, 7320 Yankee Road, Liberty Twp., Ohio 45044.
Don’t want to write a letter? Send your Speak Up comments to speakup@coxohio.com. This feature is for brief comments by readers who prefer to remain anonymous.
Butler County has saved taxpayers $5.4 million over the past year and a half by hunting down and prosecuting food stamp traffickers. And county commissioners think that amount could double with the investment of more resources.
Commissioners on Thursday approved adding a third sheriff’s deputy to the food stamp fraud detail. With that accomplished, Commissioner Don Dixon gave the executive director of Job and Family Services 60 days to formulate a plan for further expanding the enforcement efforts.
JFS Executive Director Jerome Kearns said when layoffs hit his department hard, investigative efforts into food stamp fraud suffered. His department partnered with the sheriff’s and prosecutor’s offices to tackle the problem of food stamps changing hands for drug money and other uses besides feeding the hungry.
Since July 2012, the county received 449 complaints, arrested 94 scofflaws and sentenced 90 offenders, saving $5.4 million. Kearns said 55 people have been disqualified from receiving food stamps anywhere in the country, for life. Nationally, in 2012, $74.6 billion worth of food assistance was issued and $746 million of that was trafficked.
“These numbers clearly show we’re not even touching the tip of the iceberg,” Dixon said. “We now have three investigators, and we probably need 10 times that many, and we probably need a couple prosecutors just to focus on that. I know those are big numbers and everybody knows I’m not much for increasing our personnel, but this payback is huge and it has to be done.”
With the third deputy on board arresting people who traffic food stamps, the county will now pay $215,000 annually for the partnerships with the prosecutor and sheriff.
“We knew there was some fraud out there with regard to food stamps, we didn’t have any idea what the extent of it would be,” Commissioner Cindy Carpenter said. “When we look at the $5.4 million in fraudulent activity, that’s an extraordinary number. It certainly justifies increasing the staff.”
Kearns said the program is a one-of-a-kind in the state and the state JFS agency is looking into making Butler County a model for other jurisdictions. Trafficking isn’t the only way to defraud the system, but it is the only one the team is concentrating on now because of federal guidelines.
In order to accomplish Dixon’s directive, Kearns said he will reach out to the state for help, as well as look at his own budgets.
“We need to get these results in front of some decision-makers in Columbus,” he said. “Really show them the impact we have had, with the resources we do have and advocate for funding to come back to us to expand this program.”
Sheriff Richard Jones said the numbers Kearns presented could be a drop in the bucket compared to the number of people who have been deterred by the program.
“The impact we don’t have a number on are the people that are seeing this and have stopped the fraud, which I suspect is the equivalent of another $5.5 million,” he said.
Commissioner T.C. Rogers noted the food stamp dollars saved are federal funds, so the traffickers aren’t directly impacting the local till, but he said the effort is still worthy.
“The food stamp money, from our standpoint, it’s mostly coming from the federal government, so yeah, we would get by if we didn’t do anything,” he said. “But this is one of those glaring examples that the local government is the most effective government. So we’re watching the tax dollars, even though they aren’t directly our tax dollars.”
Benjamin Johnson, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, said at least one other county partners with law enforcement to curb food stamp fraud, but every county operates a little differently. He said OJFS supports Butler County’s efforts.
“We encourage counties to innovate and find new ways to maintain the integrity of Ohio’s public assistance programs,” he said. “Fraud costs all of us, and it is important for counties to use whatever tools they have available to prevent fraud, waste and abuse.”
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