Public Benefits Reform Informational Hearing
| CommentsThe Assembly Public Benefits Reform committee held an informational hearing today at the Capitol, inviting representatives from the Wisconsin Departments of Children and Families (DCF), Health Services (DHS) and Workforce Development (DWD) to give the committee an overview of their programs and their efforts to combat waste, fraud and abuse.
Each of these departments administer important programs to fight hunger and poverty. And since they are publicly funded, it is important that they are operated as efficiently and effectively as possible to ensure that taxpayer dollars are being directed to helping families through tough times.
Based on the testimony and the questioning from the committee members, a couple of things jumped out at me as particularly interesting:
- These state agencies are working hard to provide cost-effective services by rooting out internal inefficiencies. They are also invested in rooting out and recovering waste, fraud and abuse.
- Most of the fraud in the system is perpetrated by bad actors on the provider side rather than on the client side. This tracks with national trends. Nationally, the rate of fraud in the FoodShare program is about 1.6%.
- The goal of Wisconsin Works (W2, or TANF) is to connect people to family supporting jobs, yet the statutory income eligibility is 115% of the federal poverty line, which is an annual income of $23,104 for a family of three. That means that if a family of three had a single, full-time breadwinner making more than $11.55 they would no longer qualify for the program because a member would have a family supporting job.
- The average state approval rates in the FoodShare program has been declining for the last few years and are tracking below national averages. Similarly, the rates of recertification approvals are curiously low when judged against national averages. Based on my previous work on the program nationally, this may be a symptom an administrative issue. I would be very curious to learn more about this.
What do you think? Watch the proceedings here on Wisconsin Eye.