Food Stamp Farm Bill Options

This document is a companion product to GAO-04-916. This document presents the results of GAO's surveys of local food stamp office supervisors. The purpose of the surveys was to determine the views of local food stamp supervisors on whether implementation of the options had achieved expected results. We developed eight surveys, one for each of the Farm Bill options, to obtain this information. We mailed out a total of 1,328 surveys to eight random samples of local food stamp office supervisors. Each of the eight samples comprised local food stamp offices in states that had implemented that option. The response rates varied between 74.0 percent and 86.1 percent. A more detailed discussion of our scope and methodology and a discussion of the summary of selected survey results are contained in our report entitled Food Stamp Program: Farm Bill Options Ease Administrative Burden, but Opportunities Exist to Streamline Participant Reporting Rules among Programs (GAO-04-916, Washington, D.C.: September 21, 2004). While this e-supplement contains information on the results from local food stamp offices, another e-supplement (GAO-04-1058SP) contains information on the results from our survey of food stamp administrators. We conducted our survey work between December 2003 and April 2004 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.