A Guam household removed from the food stamp program because it made too much money continued to receive food stamp payments for months afterward because of a government mistake, according to a newly released audit.
The Department of Public Health and Social Services did not adequately monitor the island’s food stamp program, either overpaying or underpaying food stamp recipients, according to an audit of the government’s federal programs for Fiscal 2019, released Monday by the Office of Public Accountability.
Fiscal 2019 includes the last three months of Gov. Eddie Calvo’s administration and the first nine months of Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero’s administration.
The audit uncovered monitoring and reporting problems for several federally funded programs. Among other things, GovGuam in 2018 failed to conduct a mandatory inventory of all equipment purchased with federal funds. Auditors identified 21 problems in federal programs administered by nine different GovGuam agencies.
Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero on Monday did not comment on the audit, saying she has not yet seen it.
“We take it very seriously. Federal programs are important,” said Department of Administration Director Edward Birn. He said the compliance audit for federal programs is completed each year, with auditors reporting issues each year. DOA submitted a corrective action plan, he said, responding to the audit findings.
The compliance audit examined 25 different case files for the $102 million food stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, finding problems with five of those test cases.
According to auditors: There was no case file for one SNAP recipient; two recipients were overpaid, based on USDA guidelines; and one household continued to receive SNAP payments despite being removed from the program months earlier because their income was too high. The household lost SNAP eligibility in March 2018, but continued to receive monthly SNAP benefits from October 2018 through February 2019, the report stated.
According to a separate report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the SNAP program, Guam overpaid about 9.74% of SNAP clients during Fiscal 2019 and underpaid about 2.15%.
GovGuam, which is required to conduct a physical inventory of all equipment purchased using federal money, failed to do so in 2018, the report states. The last physical inventory was performed in January 2016, the report states, and it still had not been done as of Sept. 30, 2019. According to the audit, Guam’s major federally funded programs bought about $14.5 million in equipment between 2015 and 2019.
The audit also questioned the government’s decision to continue to contract services from the Guam Medical Referral Assistance Office on an emergency basis, without documents to support a continued emergency. If there is no emergency, the contract must be put out to bid, according to the audit.
“GovGuam did not effectively plan for the expiration of existing contracts and did not enforce compliance with applicable procurement requirements,” the report states.
Auditors also examined 60 case files for the federally funded Medical Assistance Program, finding problems with two cases.
There was no file available for one case. For the other case, the Social Security number of one household member was not properly entered, so that person never was examined for income eligibility. A computerized management system was supposed to raise a red flag because of the bad Social Security number, but failed to do so.
Public Health needs to enforce its recordkeeping and monitoring and fix any problems with the computer notification system, according to auditors.
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August 31, 2020 at 12:41PM
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Audit: Family removed from food stamps continued to receive benefits - Pacific Daily News
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