By Melissa Patrick
Kentucky Health News
“With food insecurity rising, Kentucky continues to aggressively investigate individuals on fraud allegations, with some legal experts claiming they rely too much on faulty evidence,” Sylvia Goodman reports for Kentucky Public Radio.
Goodman writes about a single mother from Salyersville who relied on federal food assistance, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. She lost her benefits in 2020 after Kentucky state investigators concluded she’d committed fraud based on her shopping patterns.
“The state alleged she’d made multiple same-day purchases, tried to overdraw her account a few times, entered a few invalid PINs and sometimes made ‘whole-dollar’ purchases that are unlikely during typical grocery runs,” Goodman reports.
The woman’s explanation: “She worked at the store. She would sometimes buy lunch there and then get groceries after work. Her child would also occasionally use her card,” Goodman writes, adding that she sued and she won.
“It is draconian to take away SNAP benefits from a single mother without clear and convincing evidence that intentional trafficking was occurring during a time when food scarcity is so prevalent,” Franklin County Judge Thomas Wingate said in his 2023 decision.
Over the last five years, Goodman reports that the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services has brought hundreds of fraud cases that are heavily reliant on transactional data, despite judges, lawyers and legal experts telling KPR that such evidence proves little.
“Kentucky is so aggressive in disqualifying people from SNAP benefits that the state has the second-highest number of per-capita administrative disqualifications in the nation, behind Florida, according to the most recent federal data from 2023. In the last decade, disqualifications in Kentucky rose from fewer than 100 in 2015 to over 1,800 in 2023. And more than 300 others have been accused of selling or misusing their benefits since January 2024, according to records obtained by Kentucky Public Radio,” Goodman reports.
Goodman explains how people are informed of their alleged fraud: “Kentuckians receive notice of their alleged suspicious activity through mailed letters, in which they’re asked to voluntarily waive their right to a hearing and automatically accept the punishment. On first offense, that’s generally a one-year SNAP ban. They’re also required to pay back the full amount the state says they misused.” Often, Goodman reports, the lawsuits state that people don’t understand the consequences of that waiver.
Goodman reports that Kendra Steele, a spokesperson for CHFS, declined to schedule an interview with cabinet officials after multiple requests. “Steele said in an email that ‘we have never’ brought trafficking cases based solely on transactional data and acknowledged it would not be sufficient to prove intent,” she writes. Steele added that fraud allegations look into income, living situations and “patterns of spending that are indicative of trafficking.” Also, Steele told KPR that they interview vendors and SNAP recipients.
In her story, Goodman digs into the impact of food insecurity in Kentucky and what’s going on in other states, writing that “in 2020, Michigan state court of appeals judges decided transactional data alone is never sufficient to prove that a business — or a person — fraudulently used SNAP benefits.” University of Kentucky law professor Cory Dodds told Goodman that he believes that should be the standard for all states, including Kentucky.
Goodman also explains that “when Kentuckians receive the formal notice of accusations, they also receive a waiver asking that person to voluntarily forgo their right to a hearing and automatically accept the punishment.”
But legal experts told KPR that “there’s no benefit to signing the waiver — the punishment isn’t lessened, nor does refusing to sign lead to criminal prosecution,” she writes.
Another challenge for rural Kentuckians is that there are fewer lawyers with expertise in this type of law in rural Kentucky, Kristie Goff, an AppalRed legal aid lawyer in Prestonsburg in southeast Kentucky, told KPR.
“I imagine for every one person who walks through my door to get a hearing,” Goff said, “there’s probably five more that have never known that they could call us or known that they could get an attorney.”
Associated Press data reporter Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report. This reporting is part of a series called Sowing Resilience, a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and The Associated Press.
