VOL. can NO. 125**
n
Doleful Problem
Food-Stamp Red Tape
Raises Tension Levels
In Understaffed Offices
Monthly Reports of Changes
In Income Create Snarls;
The Newark, N.J., Scene
Are Costs Actually Higher?
Reagan's Changes
With Mr. Reagan's arrival in Washington, such changes accelerated. Food-stamp
benefits were reduced, and the program was
restricted to "the truly needy," defined as
those whose incomes fall below 130% of the
poverty level. Under this rule, a family of
four must earn less than $13,260 to qualify
for food stamps. The tone was set by presidential adviser Robert Carleson, who as Mr.
Reagan's welfare director in California during the 1970s had slashed welfare rolls by
requiring a lower income level and extensive income verification to qualify.
The most controversial Carleson-inspired
change took effect in January. It requires
the "working poor"-those whom Mr. Reagan said he wants to encourage-to report
and document their income each month.
Formerly, caseworkers reviewed their
status only periodically, and benefits were
based on expected earnings.
Mr. Carleson, who recently left the White
House to join a consulting firm, says
monthly reporting enables the government
to calculate benefits more precisely. "AH recipients have to do," he says, "is fill out a
simple little form."
In New Jersey, that form is four pages
long. Among other things, it asks clients to
itemize earnings, Social Security benefits,
veterans' benefits, child support and unemployment insurance for each household
member. Some have likened it to filing a
monthly income-tax return.
By JANET GUYON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOUHNAL
NEWARK, NJ.-Charlotte Collier, senior
clerk at the Essex County food-stamp office
here, glares across the counter at a roomful
of impatient recipients. "I ain't taking no
more names until you get in line," she
snaps. A few shuffle into a crooked queue.
The first week of each month at this and
other drab corners of the food-stamp bureaucracy, the battle lines are clearly
drawn: On one side are the local administrators and clerks who follow federal and
state directives to dispense the monthly
vouchers that are exchanged for food. On
the other side are the hungry poor, who
crowd the waiting room from 7 a.m. on,
seeking food stamps that didn't arrive by
mail on schedule.
Cynicism and hostility abound in both
camps, and never more so than in recent
months. For in its campaign against waste
and fraud, the Reagan administration has
transformed the food-stamp program into a
bureaucratic never-never land.
Prodded by the White House, Congress
has rewritten the law and the Agriculture
Department has been coming out with a host
of new regulations that are then carried out
through varying directives issued by the
states and local governments. Food-stamp
workers say they can't keep track of the
rules, and the poor often suffer because no
one can unravel the red tape. The result is
heightened tension-even violence-between
the needy and the foot soldiers trying to
carry out the bewildering marching orders.
Elusive Savings
Security Problem
Mrs. Collier, a small woman of 39 in
high-top tennis shoes, rules the room here in
Newark with a perpetual scowl, aided by
two security guards and an armed Essex
County policeman. "The first month I
worked here, some lady hit me in tlie back,"
she says. "People call up the operators and
tell them to throw lye in my face. But it's
not against me, it's against the food stamps.
They think we'r»
The other day, a drunk applicant was
taken to jail after harassing the policeman
on duty. A day later, police arrested another
applicant for sexually assaulting a worker
and hitting the worker's husband, who happened to be there, over the head with a
chair.
"Believe me," says Clemmie Dyson, a
brightly dressed supervisor, "we're lucky
we don't have a riot."
Almost from its inception in the mid1960s, the food-stamp program has been
caught in the political cross fire between
those wishing to feed the poor and those trying to wipe out fraud. Food stamps have the
support of the agriculture industry, simply
because they represent a huge market for
its surplus goods. Congress revamped the
program in 1977, and it has continued to tinker with it during annual budget reviews,
gradually tightening eligibility requirements.
i
The administration has said that if all of
the nation's 20 million food-stamp recipients
were required to report monthly, $270 million in overpaid benefits could be saved. So
far, however, it appears that the new system is actually costing the government
money.
Preliminary results of a yet-to-be-released, year-long study begun in 1981 in Illinois showed that in the first six months of
monthly reporting in a pilot program, both
benefit and administrative costs rose. Abt
Associates Inc., the Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm that evaluated the program for
the federal government, estimated that
_ monthly reporting could be expected to in"crease administrative costs by at least 5%,
without necessarily providing any saving in
benefits. The Illinois study also showed that
nearly all recipients dropped from foodstamp roils under the new rules were still
poor enough to qualify but couldn't deal with
the paper work.
In New Jersey, where average foodstamp benefits are about $43 a month, welfare officials estimate that monthly reporting costs an extra S25 a month to process
each case. Workers say they haven't had i
time to calculate whether benefit outlays
have been reduced.
, In practice, many cases go unprocessed.
Supervisors don't have the time to review
the monthly forms before the deadline for issuing stamps. In such cases, the stamps are
held at the food-stamp office and applicants
often appear there asking questions.
« "Every month I fill the report out and I
send it back, and every month, my stamps
are late," says Lelar Arbuckle, 39, who is
,iyie sole support of two teen-age boys in
'"Newark. "The month before last, I mailed it
in and they told me, 'Well, we can't find it.'
> It makes you get to the point where you say
the hell with it."
" To enter the Essex County office, applicants must pick their way through a cluster
of men who mill about the entrance, Smoking and drinking. In the dirty waiting room,
half the fluorescent lights are burned out',
and a haze of smoke hangs in the air despite
bilingual "No Smoking" signs. Behind a
long reception counter, workers sit at gray
metal desks heaped with forms. The
rhythms of Michael Jackson from portable
radios mingle with the din of the public-address system and,incessantly ringing telephones.
Confrontation at the Counter
Eunice Love, a stout woman in a gray
coat, squares off at the reception counter
. with Mrs. Collier. She has taken the day off
from her $4.30-an-hour factory job to find
out what happened to her food stamps. She
says she returned her monthly form on time
and wasn't notified that it was incomplete or
late. Yesterday, Mrs. Love's mother came
in to track down the missing stamps but was
sent home with yet another form.
. "I'm losing time from work," Mrs. Love
says testily. "There's got to be some mix-up
\i\ this office."
* "Your form probably didn't arrive on
time," replies.Mrs. Collier. "You got to sit
down and wait for your name to be
called."
Mrs. Love doesn't move.
"I'm not going through it again with
you," Mrs. Collier says. "Will you have a
seat. Miz Love?"
- When she again refuses, Mrs. Collier
summons the police officer, who ushers Mrs.
Love to a seat.
Two-and-a-half hours later, Mrs. Love
sits down with a caseworker to unravel her
case. It seems her income form arrived at
the Newark office a day late, so it wasn't
processed, and her stamps are being held.
"I try to get everything in like they
want," Mrs. Love says, "but they got me so
confused. I got to keep running down here,
losing time from my job. I tell you, if I could
take care of myself I wouldn't go through all
this red tape."
Reduced Allotment
Mrs. Love is separated from her husband
and has three children to support. Ordinarily, she says, the stamps keep her from having to choose between eating and paying the
rent. But because her reported income has
'. risen, her caseworker reduces her monthly
; food-stamp allotment to S62 from $116. First,
\ however, the $116 in stamps that had been
I automatically issued to her and held at the
I office must be canceled. It will take two
i weeks before she gets the new stamps. And
'none of the calculations factor in her recent
| $64 rent increase, because her rent exceeds
. -f'" : ,
Hhe guideline. '
. As it is, Mrs. Love says with tears wellling up in her eyes, "We don't eat real
r' •••••
Vneals. It's just survival."
\ The 135 employees at the Newark office
}ike their clients, mostly middle-aged black
U-omen-aren't oblivious to the plight of people like Mrs. Love. But their own frustrafions tend to show in their dealings with cliknls. They are particularly resentful that,
* hile the federal government is imposing
more work, Essex ^County jias_ vowed to reduce welfare administrative costs and thusl
hasn't hired additional food-stamp staffers. |
Clemmie Dyson and Linda Bass super-»
vise, the 3,000 cases , required to report j
monthly in Newark. Usually, they only have
time to separate the income forms into different categories: incorrect forms, people
whose benefits are to be decreased or increased, and people whose status is unchanged. They give first attention to those
requiring a reduction in benefits, but they
seldom complete even all of these.
If a client fails to return his completed
form by the seventh of the month, he is supposed to be sent a reminder that the extended deadline is the 17th. Often, however,
these reminders go out after the final deadj line. Miss Bass says such lapses "make us
j look like a joke." She adds: "People don't
; want to hear about computer errors and pa1 per-work problems. All they know is there's
no food in the house."
Though monthly reporting is designed to
catch fraud, workers say that if someone is
going to lie about his income, filing a
monthly form by mail won't stop him. When
things were simpler, workers called employers to verify clients' income and employment. Now, with so much more to do,
applicants must provide documentation,
mainly paycheck stubs. Nor is there time
now for the usual methods of detecting
fraud, such as running computer crosschecks of payroll records and applications.
Lack of Rechecking
Mrs. Dyson, who earns $27,000 a year after 19 years with the welfare system, says
the extra paper work prevents her from re:hecking her caseworkers' benefit calculations before signing them. Are mistakes being made? "Of .course," she says. "You
:an't keep up with all this stuff."
She pulls out a four-inch stack of memos
detailing recent rule changes. "You get so
many memos, you stop reading them," she
says. "About half the stuff they say, we
don't know what they're talking about." All
day long, her phone jangles with irate calls^
while her subordinates bring problems to
her desk and her superiors issue new
lives. "I get to the point sometimes when
sincerely don't care." she
griculture Department infor-^
mally proposed an entirely new set of foodstamp regulations in March, the outrage,
understandably, was palpable at food-stamp
offices throughout the land. Agriculture Department officials say those regulations are
still under review. The aide to one Congressman who opposes the new regulations suggests that the administration is waiting until
_______
after the election.
Food atariTp worKers and applicants/
meanwhile, continue to slog their way
through the system. In a worn building in
downtown Brooklyn, N.Y., Ramon Guerrero
is one of 21 workers screening food-stamp
applicants. Isaac Boyd and his wife. Donna,
want stamps to tide them over until their
college-education grants from the Veterans
Administration arrive. They both lost their
jobs as security guards and are two months
behind in the rent.
Problem of Documents
Mr. Boyd, a strapping black man wearing sunglasses, one earring and a black beret, piles the required documents on Mr.
Guerrero's desk. He has brought his apartment lease, last paycheck stub, telephone
| bill, marriage license, military discharge
papers and employment records for the last
. 12 months.
, It isn't enough. "You say you've got $5 in
| the bank," says Mr. Guerrero, scanning the
I application. "I need to see the bank book."
Mr. Boyd doesn't have iu Nor does, he have
a letter from his college verifying the VA
grant. Mr. Guerrero asks Mr. Boyd to sign
half a dozen forms and jells him to come
back with the bank book and letter.'.
Mr. Guerrero, a Dominican,.also handles
all the office's Spanish-speaking clients, and
he says that only rarely do applicants bring
all the documents needed tp get stamps the
first time they come in. '''My people, you
know, they don't like to go and get things,"
he says. "Sometimes you ask them for a Social Security card and they give you everything but that."
Two weeks later, Mr. Boyd returns with
the missing documents. In the meantime,
his sister has sent him $500 to pay back rent.
"Now they need a letter stating the check
came from my sister-in-law," Mrs. Boyd
says. "Three days last week we didn't eat at
all until we could borrow some money.
We're getting the runaround." By the time
the food-stamp office obtains the documentation necessary to issue the stamps, he suggests, the Boyds won't need them. Their V4
checks will have arrived.