Street Practice by Lori McNeil

Author:Lori McNeil [McNeil, Lori]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781315611068
Google: ogo5ngAACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-15T06:01:58+00:00

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September 6, 2007

Process for Keeping Food Stamps is Criticized

By RAY RIVERA

The city’s cumbersome process for recertifying food stamp eligibility may be dissuading many recipients who qualify for the federally subsidized program from renewing their benefits, a new study suggests.

The study, to be released today by the Urban Justice Center, found that 61 percent of people in a study group who were receiving food stamps dropped out of the federally subsidized program within 20 months, even though most were financially eligible.

The findings provide a look at the problem from a new direction. In the past, the most attention was focused on the bureaucratic obstacles for people enrolling for food stamps for the first time. The study found that the city had made strides in tearing down those barriers. But it also showed that renewing the benefits, which most people have to do every 6 to 12 months, was a time-consuming process bogged down in redundant paperwork.

“By design, the recertification process is supposed to be less burdensome, and yet clearly it’s still raising a lot of problems for a lot of clients,” said Rebecca Widom, one of the report’s authors.

Officials with the New York City Human Resources Administration, which administers the food stamp program, said that the study painted an overly negative picture, in part by automatically assuming that people failed to renew because of the complexity of the process: for example, some people may have moved away.

“What people told us both in the initial application process and the recertification process was that they didn’t have time to sit in the food stamp office for hours on end,” Ms. Widom said.

“We had people showing up at 9 in the morning and not leaving until 3 p.m., and if you’re working, that’s really a major disincentive.”

In addition, people often found it difficult to get time off work, find child care and obtain the necessary documents to recertify, Ms. Widom said.

Mr. Diamond said the agency had taken several steps to ease the recertification process: it allows more recertifications by mail for elderly and disabled people who are on fixed incomes, and in the fall, the agency plans to test a telephone renewal system.

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