The Food Stamp Program is designed to promote the general welfare and to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation’s population by raising the nutrition levels of low-income families. Recipients use their food stamp benefits to purchase allowable food products from authorized retail food merchants. Eligibility for food stamp benefits is determined on a household basis. A household can be an individual, a family, or another group who lives together and customarily purchases and prepares food in common. Applicants must provide a Social Security number for each household member. The value of the food stamp benefits for a household is determined by the number of eligible household members and their income, adjusted for assets and such costs as expenses for shelter and utilities. Nationally, the average monthly value of the benefit per household member is about $73. The household’s monthly food stamp allotment increases with each additional member, provided income limits are not exceeded. Households that receive food stamps are required to report changes in household membership, such as the loss of a member, to the administering state agency. Within USDA, the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) administers the Food Stamp Program through agreements with state agencies. FNS is responsible for approving state plans for operation and for ensuring that the states are administering the program in accordance with regulations. The states are required to establish a performance reporting system to monitor the program, including a quality control review process to help ensure that benefits are issued only to qualifying households and that the benefit amounts are correct. State agencies are responsible for imposing penalties for violations of program requirements and are responsible for recovering food stamp overpayments. The federal government pays all of the benefit costs and one-half of the administrative costs for each state. In 1996, USDA paid the states about $1.7 billion to administer the program. The program is administered by states. Eligibility workers in service centers work directly with clients to certify household eligibility and determine benefit amounts at the time of application and at least annually thereafter. With respect to deceased individuals, SSA’s information is more comprehensive than that gathered by state agencies. SSA compiles information in its Death Master File from a wide variety of sources, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Health Care Finance Administration, funeral directors, and its own internal claims and postentitlement processes. SSA also includes in the Death Master File death information that it purchases from the states through agreements negotiated with each state. About half of these agreements restrict SSA’s ability to disclose this information to agencies in other states. Each Social Security number in the Death Master File has been verified to ensure that it is associated with the appropriate name, date of birth, and gender for each deceased individual. SSA updates its file monthly. In contrast, state information regarding deceased individuals is initially compiled at the local level by, for example, county departments of health, which gather the information from local funeral homes and other sources, including coroners. The counties forward the information to a designated state agency, such as the state bureau of vital statistics. During calendar years 1995 and 1996, about $8.5 million in food stamp benefits were improperly collected by households that included deceased individuals—nearly 26,000 in total—in the four states we examined. (See table 1.) While these individuals were counted in food stamp households for an average of 4 months, we identified 177 instances in which deceased individuals were counted as beneficiaries for the full 2 years covered by our review. We also identified 20 instances in which such individuals were counted in more than one state during the period of our review. The deceased individuals whom we identified in our match were members of households of varying sizes, some with multiple members and some with a single member—the deceased individual was the household. For households with multiple members, the household may have included a deceased individual as a member at application, or the member may have passed away while on the food stamp rolls. But benefits continued to be issued on the presumption that the individual was present in the home. For single-member households, some other individual obtained the benefits. In these cases, the food stamps could have been issued either to a person designated as the deceased individual’s authorized representativeor to someone who fraudulently represented himself or herself as the deceased individual. Food stamp benefits are issued either as coupons or via electronic benefit transfer systems. For coupons, issuance procedures require clients to present various items of identification, such as Food Stamp Program cards bearing their signature, in order to pick up food stamps from a service center or other outlet. A small number of the coupons are mailed to the clients. Under an electronic benefit transfer system, the state agency issues access cards (similar to debit cards) and personal identification numbers to clients who obtain benefits through point-of-sale terminals in stores. However, the effectiveness of the issuance procedures to ensure that only eligible participants receive benefits depends on how rigorously the procedures are followed by the responsible staff and clients. Deceased individuals are included in food stamp households because (1) local agencies use unverified and incomplete information to determine the composition of a household when calculating benefits and (2) recipients of benefits sometimes do not notify the agencies of changes in household composition. Some states have attempted to verify the information that food stamp clients provide on household composition through computer matching of this information with deaths reported to the state, although the program does not require such matching. The success of these efforts has been mixed, largely because the states do not have complete, accurate, and timely data. Currently, even the information SSA reports to the states on deaths is incomplete—SSA provides information only on deceased individuals who received both SSA benefits and food stamp benefits, not just food stamp benefits. Most agencies primarily rely on food stamp applicants to provide accurate information on household composition and to report subsequent changes, such as the loss of a household member. In general, the Food Stamp Program takes this approach because it has to balance the issues of clients’ convenience, administrative simplicity, and payment accuracy; consequently, controls over determining household composition are not as rigorous as they could be. A household that wishes to receive benefits must present an application listing members and their Social Security numbers and provide information about income and other eligibility factors. Eligibility workers review this information, obtain identification documents such as a driver’s license, interview a household representative, and certify eligibility. In addition, they recertify the household at least annually. However, at no time are all household members required to appear and present identification. Furthermore, clients are responsible for identifying changes in household composition. According to FNS, which identifies error rates for each state by reviewing a random sample of cases, clients’ errors or misrepresentations contribute significantly to incorrectly issued benefits, particularly when overpayments occur. In 1996, FNS reported that about 7 percent of the benefits issued nationwide were overpayments and that 57 percent of the overpayments were attributable to intentional or unintentional inaccuracies in client-provided information. Nevertheless, FNS’ regulations do not require the verification of client-provided information on household composition, unless the eligibility workers deem the information “questionable.” The regulations allow each state agency to develop guidance for identifying questionable information. In the states we visited, the guidance defined questionable information as applicants’ statements that were contradictory or did not agree with the information that was in the case record or otherwise available to the eligibility workers. FNS has not required the states to match Social Security numbers of deceased individuals with the numbers provided for the Food Stamp Program. When the eligibility workers in the states we visited suspected questionable or fraudulent information, they could refer the application to investigators before granting aid. Investigators in each state told us that they try to verify questionable information on household composition by visiting homes and making collateral contacts to confirm information with friends, neighbors, or landlords. According to the investigators, these techniques are hit-or-miss, time-consuming, costly undertakings and provide information that is only as reliable as its source. Furthermore, investigative resources are generally very limited. Although some state agencies have employed their own computer matches as a means of identifying deceased individuals who are included in food stamp households, the practice does not appear to be widespread. Of the states we visited, California, Florida, and New York have established a matching program between the state’s public assistance rolls (for all assistance programs, not just food stamps) and the state’s death records from its vital statistics agency. According to FNS, only two other states, Illinois and Ohio, currently perform a monthly computer match between state records of deceased individuals and their food stamp rolls, and two other states, Maryland and Pennsylvania, have conducted matches, but not routinely. The California Department of Health Services conducts a monthly match of its assistance eligibility rolls, including that for food stamps, with state death records from its vital statistics agency. However, because the agency’s Social Security numbers are not verified, and the information is limited to California, mismatches may occur, and some deceased individuals may not be identified. While Florida officials consider their match to be very useful, the state’s reliance on unverified Social Security numbers and other identifying information reduces its effectiveness. The officials appreciate the positive effects of their match on the overall integrity of assistance programs (food stamps, Medicare, and others) because it eliminates ineligible individuals from the rolls and discourages fraud and abuse. However, because the agency’s match is based solely on Social Security numbers, and these numbers are not verified in the state’s record of deceased individuals, invalid matches are produced. During the first year of the match (initiated in December 1995), 4,528 matches were acted on by eligibility workers in the following way: 1,439 cases were updated, 21 cases were referred for fraud investigation, and 57 cases were determined to be duplicative.