Get comfy…this will take a while.
A chain of emails related to the operation of Missouri’s food stamp program arrived yesterday. State Representative Sarah Unsicker (D – Shrewsbury) shared this information.
An outstate gentleman serves as legal guardian for an incapacitated person. The routine, typical review of the Ward’s account came due and the gentleman tried to comply.
It did not go well.
For decades, Missourians handled their food stamp and other benefit accounts by visiting the Department of Social Service/Family Support Division office located in their county. Every county had one, Worth County with 2,000 residents and St. Charles County with 400,000. St. Louis County (with about a million people) often had two offices.
To streamline the system, the state said, and to save money (many of us decided), most county offices were replaced with Resource Centers, such as a room in a food pantry or other non-profit. For example, Sts. Joachim and Anne Care Service in St. Charles County gave space to a center. DSS also opened Call Centers to handle many routine transactions.
Federal rules, however, still required DSS to conduct a face to face interview with the head of a household seeking food stamps. Keep in mind that the paper application for food stamps – currently eight pages – includes Social Security numbers, dares of birth, job and income information and other personal data on every member of the household even if they are not included on the application. Backing up that information requires a lot of documents. Applying or being re-certified for food stamps is a lot of work. Those of us in the advocacy world take issue with the way Missouri and other states collect and secure (?) that data. And, how needlessly dehumanizing the process is. DSS requires people to jump through hoops, then tells them they were supposed to go through feet first.
A side effect of COVID 19 has been DSS, with Washington’s permission, temporarily changing long-standing food stamp rules.
In the case at hand, the legal guardian assembled the Ward’s documents and tried to get them re-certified for stamps. Then the fun began…
DSS now maintains that recertifications must be handled by email, fax or mailing the paperwork to the state:
- The gentleman tried email: the state’s system would not accept the email because it was larger than the system allowed.
- Who has fax machines? Copy centers and such who sell that service. Faxing the paperwork could cost $25.00 or more, money someone poor enough to get food stamps probably doesn’t have.
- Mail the paperwork? Even before the pandemic DSS lost a lot of paperwork. Or, worse, pages within a packet got separated, resulting in applicants getting accused of not supply information they had included.
Not liking the three official choices, the gentleman visited an actual DSS office. He knew the underlying rules and expected to have the right to speak with and get help from a state worker on a benefit case. The security guard was friendly but, well, the two state workers present need to work on their people skills. The guard gave the gentleman a paper with three phone numbers to call to set-up a phone interview. The workers would do nothing for the gentleman at the state office.
Now it gets interesting…
DSS claims that three business days after the food stamp papers are received that the applicant will get a call from a Call Center worker: one of the state employees admitted that it takes 10 days after they’ve been received for paperwork to get scanned into the system.
If the applicant can’t take that state call, they must callback and arrange a time when they can take the call, a time when they can devote an hour or more to speaking to a state worker. Now, these calls get intricate. Any line on the application or any document backing-up the app is open to question. Picture your kitchen table piled with documents (as your two young kids run through the house) and the worker says, “No, I need the APRIL 15 paycheck information, not the April 1.” Get it right, right now, or risk losing your food stamps.
And, let’s face reality. Many people need food stamps because they lack the intellectual fire power to secure a $100,000 a year corner office job. Or, they may be old or they may be disabled – like the gentleman’s Ward. Now they’re up against a state worker who covers the same ground day after day. Should we be surprised if the encounter is tense and unproductive?
Meanwhile, as I know from contacts withing the system, phone workers get pressured by supervisors to keep the calls as short as possible. And, the state constantly struggles to hire, train and keep Call Center staff. I attended many meetings where the monthly overview found DSS very often losing more call staff than they could hire.
Back in the 1980’s I conducted thousands upon thousands of interviews with people seeking help from METROPLEX, St. Louis County’s community action agency. After that I trained staff and volunteers who conducted similar interviews. I expect most all of us found face to face interviews more productive than trying to handle things over the phone. Across a desk you can relate to a person and see that certain questions don’t need answers, or, work with the person to find the needed paper. If additional stuff was needed, a few seconds writing a take home note listing “A, B, C” is better than trying to get the interviewee to write it up themselves.
In a reply to Rep. Unsicker regarding the gentleman’s experience, the DSS Legislative Director, Caitlin Whaley stated that their Family Support Division is allowed under pandemic rules to handle interviews just by phone. She further noted:
We have been scheduling appointments via phone and also launched an online scheduler at the beginning of May. FSD has found that they are able to successfully resolve nearly half of all appointment requests via telephone.
So, more than half of requests are not resolved by phone, essentially meaning they don’t get resolved since you can’t get helped at a DSS office or a Resource Center?
Okay, I’m not surprised. Helping struggling people has never been a priority for the Greitens/Parson administration.
Start near the top. DSS has had an Acting Director for years. The head of Medicaid pulled his ripcord months ago. Getting competent, permanent leaders in these positions could have been done during this recently past legislative session. It was not.
Like other state employees, Missouri DSS staff remain the worst paid in the nation. They receive little sympathy or support from elected officials, and, His Accidency had to be ordered by a Cole County judge to recognize and deal with the unions representing state workers, including DSS employees.
The gentleman’s issues as documented do answer a question for me. With the current economic malaise and Missouri’s particularly awful economy, I kept wondering why more people in this state weren’t receiving food stamps. Based on the 2008 financial meltdown and other events in recent decades I can’t figure out why we don’t have over a million Missourians on food stamps.
Yes, I knew access to the system – never good – turned horrible. Until this email chain I didn’t realize how non-functional the system had become.
Oh yes, remember how Governor Mike Parson ordered federal pandemic unemployment benefits killed because he feels too many people are drawing free money instead of working?
Food stamp benefits got speed-balled due to Covid. The average benefit per person per meal here in Missouri jumped from around $1.30 in 2019 to $2.28 this March. [ www.dss.mo.gov/research ] That’s $90 per person per month in extra groceries!
So, if a love of free money keeps people from working, why don’t jumbo-sized food stamp benefits get more people signing-up?
I keep waiting for the Republican legislature’s super-majority to team up with the statewide elected GOP members to change that pesky state motto. The welfare of the people is obviously not the supreme law in Missouri.
Glenn