Last week’s defeat of the farm bill also killed — at least for the time being — new initiatives to ferret out fraud in the food stamp program, including people simultaneously collecting benefits in more than one state.

Although some experts generally regard the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as relatively free of fraud, it turns out efforts to guard against such corruption are spotty in a number of key areas. A pilot program involving five Southern states several years ago uncovered thousands of cases of double dipping — participants who were simultaneously enrolled in multiple states.

With the federal government spending about $70 billion a year on food assistance, “Even small percentages of benefits issued in error translate into a significant improper expenditure of taxpayer dollars,” concluded a 2015 report by the National Accuracy Clearinghouse (NAC), which evaluated the pilot program.

Overall, the cost of fraud in food stamps has grown from $260.4 million in fiscal year 2010 to $592.7 million in fiscal year 2016, according to the annual SNAP State Activity Report published in September.

“Fraud is a big problem in the food stamp program,” said Kristina Rasmussen, vice president of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA).

The farm bill went down to defeat Friday in the House of Representatives for a few reasons. Democrats and moderate Republicans were upset over new work requirement rules for food stamp beneficiaries. Some conservatives were opposed to agriculture subsidies — and miffed that House leaders would not first schedule a vote on a hard-line immigration bill.

At some point, the House will have to pass a farm bill, which would authorize food stamps and agriculture programs for another five years.

Advocates of SNAP reforms hope any revised bill will leave intact anti-fraud measures. The legislation defeated Friday would have expanded on the pilot program targeting double dipping by creating a national database to prevent multiple enrollments.

The bill also would have required states to collect and submit data on applicants’ assets, wages, and program tenure to the Duplicative Enrollment Database.

The pilot program on which the national database would be grounded, initiated about five years ago by Mississippi, included Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana. Those states worked to create a system to collect and share information about people signing up for food stamps from September 2013 through May 2014, such as names, dates of birth, addresses, and Social Security numbers.

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Beginning in June 2014, the participating states received lists of potential dual enrollments and then determined whether they were, in fact, fraudulently enrolled in multiple states.

According to the National Accuracy Clearinghouse report, each state was able to significantly reduce the number of people enrolled in more than one state. Alabama and Mississippi, for instance, cut the number of dual enrollments by 81 percent, from the period before the pilot program took effect to the four months encompassing the pilot. The monthly average in Alabama declined from 1,592 before the initiative took effect to an average of 301 per month during the pilot period.

[lz_table title=”Food Stamp Fraud” source=”FY 2016 SNAP State Activity Report”]Fraud reported in food stamp program
|Fiscal Year,Amount
2010,$260.4 million
2011,$261.6 million
2012,$367.1 million
2013,$392.5 million
2014,364 million
2015,$436.1 million
2016,$592.7 million
[/lz_table]

Georgia, Florida and Louisiana also saw reductions, with the smallest clocking in at 27 percent in Georgia.

The NAC evaluation of the pilot program determined that the program, after deducting additional costs, saved $5.6 million in SNAP overpayments. The report indicates that it is a conservative estimate, since it focuses only on prevention of dual enrollment and not on early detection of double dipping. In addition, the report assumes that beneficiaries who have been flagged will remain eligible in one state, even though some may not qualify at all.

And the dual enrollment statistics cover only people who were enrolled in two of the five states — excluding beneficiaries who may simultaneously be enrolled in other states that did not participate in the pilot. It also does not include recipients who might be enrolled more than once within the same state.

[lz_table title=”Food Stamp Double Dippers” source=”National Accuracy Clearinghouse”]Average monthly food stamp recipients enrolled in multiple states before and during pilot program
|State,Before,Pilot
Alabama,1592,301
Florida,3383,2446
Georgia,3323,2427
Louisiana,862,249
Mississippi,882,166
[/lz_table]

The report estimated that the total savings of the initiative, if applied nationwide, could average $114.1 million a year.

“It’s shocking for a lot of people just how lax integrity of the food stamp program is,” Rasmussen said.

Alabama Department of Human Resources spokesman Barry Spear said creating a national database is trickier than it sounds since the states all have slightly different reporting and collection systems that must be aligned to create uniformity of the data.

“It might be common sense to do it, but you might not have the ability to do it,” he said.

Related: Freedom Caucus Kills Big-Spending Farm Bill

Mark Meckler, president of the Tea Party advocacy group Citizens for Self-Governance, said reforming food stamps would be easier if House leaders dealt with SNAP separately from the rest of the farm bill.

“This is a breach of a major promise the Republicans made that they were going to carve out food stamps from the farm bill,” he said. “Until that’s done, it’s never going to get fixed.”

PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.