The most serious issue in the program access area was that workers weren’t giving clients full disclosure regarding food stamp fraud.
“In all four of the interview observations, only the client’s right to a state hearing was consistently explained,” the report reads. “The workers failed to explain the required cooperation with the federal quality control review process, the consequences for failing to report changes, and fraud warnings and penalties.”
Executive Director Ray Pater said the only explanation he has is there are a lot of rookies on staff, but they are beefing up training.
“Approximately two-thirds of our staff is new,” he said. “Because of that, I think they were green and not giving the correct answers.”
Timeliness also continues to be an issue for the agency. The report states that a timeliness rate of 95 percent or better on the 30-day application processing is the target. Documents provided to the Journal-News by JFS show food stamp timeliness rates in the 70 percent to 80 percent range for this year, with a low of 71 percent in January and a high of 86 percent in May.
The reviewer found that the agency has made some improvements since the 2014 evaluation, such as the error rate in income verification that went from 85 percent last year to 40 percent this year. Applications that qualify for expedited processing went from 85 percent untimely to 47 percent.
Pater said adding staff is the best answer to the issues and that is what they have done and will continue do next year. In November 2011 JFS lost 50 workers — 44 were laid off and six resigned in the face of the layoffs — to make up a $3 million shortfall in the agency caused by state and federal cuts. According to the 2014 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, there were 195 total JFS employees in 2007 and that dropped to a low of 90 in 2012. According to Finance Director Barb Fabelo, public assistance employees stood at 143 in 2008, dropped to 69 in 2014, bumped up to 84 this year and will be at 103 next year.
Pater said with depleted staffing levels they have had to juggle between the two most important areas to the state and that is food stamp timeliness and the income and employment verification system (IEVS).
“With less staff we were carrying a lot of overtime, but we were literally robbing Peter to pay Paul,” he said. “We would work on the timeliness and then our numbers were bad on the IEVS… Then we had over 3,000 Medicaid applications to get processed. So this summer we had to pull everyone off other things to get this done.”
The state report was issued in March, but Pater said the mandatory Medicaid application processing has impacted the agency’s ability to address the timeliness and other issues more quickly. For example, the percent of IEVS completions was at a year-long low of 36 percent in March, it jumped up to 86 percent in July but was back down to 44 percent in October.
Assistant Director Jerome Kearns explained the drop.
“In September, we received 2,189 IEVS, we did 656 and we carried forward the remainder into October and in October we had fewer staff available due to vacations and sick time to process them,” he said. “And our overtime went from mandatory to volunteer. It was an allocation of staffing resources that resulted in us being able to process fewer in October. At this time everything from Sept. 30 is caught up and our numbers for November you’ll see an improvement in that percentage.”
Putting things in perspective, in 2009 there were 137 public assistance staffers who handled a total of 17,309 food stamp cases. Today, there are 84 workers who have handled 130,638 cases through October.
County Administrator Charlie Young said he and the commissioners were concerned when the evaluation came in.
“We’re taking action to address it,” he said. “That’s why we recognized we needed to add staff, we put in place plans to get better at what we’re doing, internal procedures to make sure we not only have enough people to do what we need to do, but also that we go back and look at the training to make sure we are doing what we need to do to meet our standards and exceed our standards.”
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