Requiring photographs of food stamp recipients on their benefit cards would do little to curb welfare fraud because the most common scheme involves willing participation from the very store clerks who would be tasked with verifying the pictures, according to a liberal think tank.
The Urban Institute concluded from its analysis of a Massachusetts law that requiring photo identification on the food stamp program’s Electronic Benefit Cards would not be a cost-effective tool in preventing fraud.
Gregory Mills and Christopher Lowenstein, the study’s authors, pointed to concerns over the costs of printing pictures and the potential for food stamp recipients to be “stigmatized” if forced to submit their photo-stamped EBT cards to cashiers.
Mills said Massachusetts is the only state to have implemented a photo ID policy in its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program since a 2008 federal statute gave states the authority to do so.
“Our research indicates photo EBT cards will do little to reduce trafficking of EBT cards in SNAP,” Mills told the Washington Examiner. “Photo EBT policies do raise program administrative costs and can also have adverse unintended consequences on SNAP clients who do not engage in trafficking, by making it more difficult for them to participate in the program and access their benefits.”
Picture ID policies pit anti-fraud efforts against people’s right to use food stamps without facing “additional scrutiny in the retail marketplace,” the study said.
The ability of such policies to prevent people from trafficking their food stamps is further weakened by the fact that cashiers often fail to check the picture on the card, the analysis found.
Photo requirements for SNAP “re-stigmatizes this important form of federal nutritional assistance,” according to the study.
But Robert Rector, senior research fellow in domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, disagreed with the main findings of the study.
“Most of the report seems to be about how Massachusetts implemented” a requirement to put picture IDs on EBT cards, Rector said. “Clearly, if you don’t require the grocery store to look at the card, it doesn’t have much effect.”
Rector argued a stricter enforcement of requirements that cashiers check the pictures on EBT cards would have increased their effectiveness in Massachusetts.
Even so, he said, printing recipients’ pictures on their EBT cards still doesn’t prevent some of the most rampant forms of food stamp fraud, which occur when retailers and individuals work “off the books” to profit from food stamps for which they are not eligible.
Rector disagreed with the Urban Institute that printing pictures on the EBT cars would heighten the stigma of relying on SNAP benefits.
“It’s the same card, it’s the same clerk, so if it’s not stigmatizing to hand the card to the clerk as a food stamp card, how is it stigmatizing for the clerk to look at the photo ID?” he said.
While he said exceptions could be made for elderly and disabled recipients, he dismissed the idea that limiting who in a family can use the card by printing only the head of household’s picture on it placed undue burdens on those beneficiaries.
“The taxpayers should be assured the money is being used for the purposes they want, even if the head of household has to do the shopping,” he said.
Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that while the study likely overestimates the amount of stigma that accompanies using an EBT card, requiring photo identification would do little to address the real source of waste in the food stamp program.
“People misusing EBT cards are not typical,” Cannon said. “It occurs, and it tends to create an uproar when it happens, but that’s not where the big bucks are.”
SNAP’s most significant source of lost taxpayer money, he said, stems from payment errors in which the government hands out more money than it should.
In 2009, the government overpaid food stamp benefits by $1.8 billion, which happened when it gave recipients too much money or provided food stamps to ineligible families, according to a Government Accountability Office audit.
The 2010 watchdog report found the Department of Agriculture had “taken few recent steps to increase state efforts to pursue recipients suspected of trafficking.”
By way of comparison, fraud drains an estimated $858 million annually, according to the Department of Agriculture, which administers the food stamp program.
Ed Bolen, senior policy analyst at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, agreed the picture ID requirement wouldn’t combat the most prevalent methods of fraud.
Bolen described as an example a situation in which an individual charged $100 on his EBT card and got $50 in cash, with the retailer pocketing the other $50. The retailer would then request reimbursement from the government for $100 worth of groceries, when in reality, “no food changed hands.”
“That sort of trafficking doesn’t seem like it would be addressed by putting a photo on the card,” Bolen said. “It’s hard to imagine that they would only do that if the face matches the card.”
Bolen noted the switch from paper food stamps to plastic cards cut down on fraud significantly.
He highlighted the potential hardships the photo ID requirement could place on families using the cards because it would prevent anyone besides the designated head of the household from grocery shopping.
Imposing such a policy would also run up additional costs for the program, Bolen noted.
“Lots of states have looked and decided not to do this because it doesn’t make sense,” he said.
But others, like Rector, have questioned whether food stamp fraud is as limited in scope as studies such as the one by the Urban Institute suggest.
The college conservative group Turning Point USA quickly found hundreds of examples of SNAP beneficiaries openly boasting of their food stamp use — and in some cases, abuse — on various social media sites using a hashtag, “#teamEBT,” to tout the cards.
“This wasn’t a ton of investigative reporting, it was people using hashtags,” said Charlie Kirk, president of Turning Point USA. Kirk said the explosion of SNAP has “created a culture of entitlement.”
Food stamp use has mushroomed across the country during the Obama administration, jumping from more than 28 million beneficiaries to more than 46 million between 2008 and 2014.
The welfare program has expanded rapidly amid active government efforts to recruit eligible families to sign up for SNAP.
