Electronic Health Records: Finding the Return on Investment

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), with a budget exceeding $80 billion annually, serves more than 45 million disadvantaged Americans. Program integrity is an essential component of administering SNAP in order to prevent losses resulting from individuals inappropriately or fraudulently applying for benefits. To address the growing challenge of public assistance fraud, a consortium of five states, led by Mississippi, working with contractors and supported by a grant from the USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), has established the National Accuracy Clearinghouse (NAC) — a contributory system of beneficiary information to support accurate and timely investigations for the SNAP and D-SNAP (the supplemental nutrition program for disaster refugees) programs.

The National Accuracy Clearinghouse (NAC) allows participating states to identify and pursue dual participation in real-time and make fraud-mitigating determinations at the point of application. The NAC’s impact on SNAP programs is the first step in its expansion to serve as nationwide cross-benefit program contributory tool designed with the capacity to enhance and protect all benefit programs. The NAC takes advantage of highly refined identity solutions to cross-check participants in order to identify cases of individuals applying for or receiving duplicate benefits across participating states. The initiative stands to create a nationwide model program for safeguarding social service benefits — offering an innovative approach to catching perpetrators of theft against government. The strategy helps to safeguard support for such programs, in part by enhancing public confidence that government is properly and responsibly administering the programs.

Learn more about the National Accuracy Clearinghouse and the work being done by the five state consortium by downloading our white paper.