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Feds Say Maine Slipped to Slowest in Processing Food Stamp Applications

AUGUSTA, Maine — Maine is facing financial penalties for being the slowest state in the country when it comes to processing food stamp applications.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the state's poor performance means that too many people are being forced to go hungry.

To meet federal standards, the USDA says Maine should be able to process 95 percent of all applications within 30 days of receiving those requests. But the agency says Maine processed less than 70 percent of those requests for the first six months of this year.

Kevin Concannon, U.S. under secretary for food, nutrition and consumer services in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says poor performance in processing food stamp requests places a hardship on the state's neediest residents.

"When they qualify for these benefits, they should be extended to them on a timely basis," Concannon says. "Unfortunately Maine is in the bottom of the pack in that regard."

Concannon, who once served as commissioner of Maine's DHHS, says that if the state does not institute corrective measures to achieve compliance, it risks losing millions of dollars in federal funding.

"There's no reason why the state should be doing as poorly as it's been doing, it means it needs attention, it needs leadership and it needs to focus on meeting the needs of Maine properly and timely," Concannon says.

"What has occurred here is that we are modernizing our approach to eligibility, moving away from what has been a very paper-intensive system," says DHHS Commissioner Mary Mayhew.

At DHHS central offices in Augusta, Mayhew says her department has made some great strides over the last six months, which were not included in the USDA report.

She says a huge part of the problem in processing the requests can be found in the state's desire to institute a new welfare eligibility system to bring higher levels of accountability and efficiency to the program. Those delays, she says, were prompted by a combination of hardware and software issues as well in the development and implementation of the new protocols.

Mayhew says the application processing times are speeding up along with the department's ability to better manage caseloads through its new internal system.

"This allows us now to track all of the tasks associated with application so that we can continue to monitor all parts of the process to ensure that it's moving in the best interests of both the timely processing of an application but also the same commitment to integrity that we are verifying appropriately information when determining eligibility," she says.

Mayhew says she will be corresponding with USDA officials to assure them that the state's processing numbers have improved.

"We are confident that we have applied significant resources to help move us back to where Maine has typically been in timely processing applications," says says.

"We continue to hear from people who are running into difficulties and experiencing delays," says Robyn Merrill, executive director at Maine Equal Justice Partners, an advocacy agency for the poor. She says her clients continue to reference delays in first-time applications and also in appeals from those who feel they've been unfairly dropped from assistance.

State Rep. Drew Gattine, a Westbrook Democrat and House chair of the Legislature's Health and Human Services Committee, says federal threats over penalties for program noncompliance are becoming increasingly common for DHHS, which has had to answer for serious violations at the Riverview Psychiatric Center and for the department's termination of a contract that helped Mainers apply for Medicaid health benefits.

"You know these things are all related and it's really becoming part of a very disturbing pattern of the inability of the department to live up to what are pretty minimal federal requirements," Gattine says.

But Republican Rep. Deb Sanderson of Chelsea, a member of Gattine's committee, says Democrats who continue to criticize Mayhew in the midst of her efforts to improve DHHS performance are simply motivated by politics.