If state lawmakers don’t act soon, Mississippi will pay at least an additional $120 million a year to run its food assistance program. That’s because of a 2017 state law that generated more paperwork for social safety net programs.
Under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump over the summer, the cost of food assistance benefits will shift from the federal government to states. How much a state will pay is based on its error rate for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
An error rate measures how accurately each state determines whether a person is eligible for SNAP benefits. States with error rates over 10%, such as Mississippi, will have to pay a penalty tied to the amount of benefits they receive.
Mississippi’s 2024 error rate of 10.69% is slightly below the national average but would still leave Mississippi on the hook for the maximum penalty.
Experts say that red tape surrounding Mississippi’s anti-hunger program has contributed significantly to its high error rate. The state’s unique and labyrinthine reporting system leads beneficiaries and the Mississippi Department of Human Services to make errors in processing applications and redeterminations.
“If we don’t get ahead of this, it is going to be a tremendous hit to the state budget,” Republican Sen. Daniel Sparks of Belmont told Mississippi Today.
Sparks has proposed legislation that would simplify SNAP paperwork, which experts say would bring the state’s error rate down.
Last year, people in Mississippi, perennially one of the poorest states in the nation, received $840 million in federal SNAP benefits.
In 2017, lawmakers passed the HOPE Act, a measure that was widely touted as fraud prevention. That move made Mississippi the only state in the nation to ban what’s called “simplified reporting” requirements for SNAP recipients. This system only required recipients to report a major change in their income immediately.
In its place, Mississippi uses a system called “change reporting.” This system requires welfare recipients to report any change in their income, household size or address within 10 days. Experts say Mississippi’s choice has hurt poor people and wasted resources.
That applies even when the changes are minimal and make no difference in enrollees’ eligibility, explained Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP at the Food Research and Action Center, a national nonprofit working to end poverty-related hunger.
If someone moves, or starts a new job – even if they’re earning the same amount – they must report those changes immediately. Under simplified reporting, enrollees would report these changes at a six-month redetermination. The increased paperwork can kick off eligible people, and it strains the system and creates more room for error.
“When you only have 10 days to get this done, to not lose benefits, it does create more of a barrier for individuals and for the state agency,” said Plata-Nino.
Errors include when applicants submit the wrong paperwork or forget to write down their landlord’s phone number, Plata-Nino said. They also include when DHS pays recipients too little. They rarely include recipients submitting fraudulent data to receive larger benefits.
“Payment error rates just reflect administrative and technical issues,” Plata-Nino said. “It’s not intentional wrongdoing.”
The SNAP program has one of the most rigorous systems to determine eligibility and payment accuracy among safety net programs, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Fraud has rarely been proven.
The stringent requirements are “one of the many reasons why eligible families in the state struggle to gain access to basic needs programs despite high poverty rates and persistent needs,” said Theresa Lau, senior policy counsel at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Because of impending shifts in costs, Lau said now is the perfect time for the state to remedy that.
Mississippi’s error rate is just barely in a higher bracket, meaning even a small decrease could save the state tens of millions of dollars a year, Lau said.
“We’re on the edge between costs shifting to 15% versus 10%,” Lau said. “Even an incremental change in our error rate could have a significant impact in terms of how (many) dollars Mississippi will have to make up.”
Senators placed their proposal in a House bill that extends the sunset date on the Legislature’s reauthorization of the Department of Human Services’s operations. Instead of agreeing with the Senate’s suggestion and sending the measure to the governor, House members voted last week to send the bill to negotiation with the Senate. This means the legislation will face further scrutiny from a small group of lawmakers before it can go back to the full chambers.
Rep. Kevin Felsher, a Republican from Biloxi and vice chairman of the House Public Health Committee, asked the House to send the bill to negotiations. He told Mississippi Today he supports the intent of the Senate’s proposal. Still, he would like the House to take more time in negotiation to study the impacts.
House Public Health Chairman Sam Creekmore, a Republican from New Albany, told Mississippi Today he is not yet sure whether he supports going back to simplified reporting requirements and that he would need to meet with the House leadership first. He was unsure when that meeting would occur.
Officials at DHS declined to comment, but the agency’s director, Bob Anderson, has previously said he supports what the Senate is doing.
Rep. Robert Johnson III, a Democrat from Natchez, asked Anderson in a 2022 hearing conducted by the Legislative Black Caucus if the director supported efforts to repeal the HOPE Act. Anderson said yes.
But Sparks said his effort to change the reporting requirements isn’t a desire to abolish the HOPE Act or to attack income verification requirements.
In fact, Sparks said he supports the Trump administration’s push for tougher oversight of the states in the One Big Beautiful Bill because each state needs to “get it right” when it comes to spending federal dollars.
“This is not an attack on the HOPE Act,” Sparks said. “It’s an enhancement of it.”
MDHS leaders this year have also asked lawmakers for additional money to buy better software and implement more robust income verification for SNAP recipients, something Sparks said he and other Senate leaders support.
Lawmakers have until March 30 to file an initial negotiated proposal on the legislation to keep it alive as the legislative session enters its final days.
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