Food Stamp Program

Achieving Cost Neutrality in Washington's Family Independence Program Gao ID: RCED-90-84 June 28, 1990

Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Food Stamp Program's progress in achieving cost neutrality in Washington under its Family Independence Program (FIP), focusing on the: (1) methods for establishing the amount of benefit and administrative costs that Washington would have incurred for food stamps in the absence of FIP; and (2) accuracy of the data and the methods used to calculate cost neutrality each quarter.

GAO found that: (1) several problems existed with the state's methodology for estimating the benefit cost of the Food Stamp Program; (2) the state needed to consider alternative methodologies that did not establish a statewide cost ceiling; (3) data gathering and reporting were erroneous for calculations of ceiling amounts and cost neutrality for the first 3 quarters of FIP operations; (4) Washington submitted a proposed method for calculating the programs' administrative cost-neutral ceiling, which included a number of questionable assumptions; (5) Washington had not received a response regarding its May 1988 or August 1989 proposed administrative methodology; and (6) several problems existed with the calculations used to determine the ceiling amount under the proposed administrative cost method.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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