By Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — The Kansas Legislature’s auditors confirmed the payment error rate for a food assistance program in Kansas exceeded a federal threshold of 6% during three consecutive years, but the Kansas Department for Children and Families said intervention strategies lowered the rate to 5.5% in August.
The audit report issued to the joint House and Senate audit committee Wednesday echoed information DCF presented in July to the House Select Committee on Government Oversight, which was assigned the task of searching for waste in state government programs.
In Kansas, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program error rate didn’t surpass the 6% benchmark from 2007 to 2018. It was 5.9% in 2018 before surging to 7.1% in 2019. The government didn’t track SNAP error rates during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
The 18-page analysis by auditors focused on DCF’s struggle with error rates that fluctuated from 9.1% in 2022 to 12.1% in 2023 and 10% in 2024. In 2023 and 2024, auditors said, DCF attributed half the errors to their own staff and placed responsibility for the other half on program recipients.
“Kansas does not appear to be alone with these issues,” said auditor Heidi Zimmerman. “As of 2024, only eight states had payment error rates at or below the federal threshold of 6%. This suggests that other states are also facing some of the same challenges we are.”
Kansas’ overall 2025 mark for errors as a percent of total SNAP benefits distributed during the year wasn’t available to auditors.
Carla Whiteside-Hicks, director of economic and employment services for DCF, told legislators the state agency employed a consultant, Human Services Group, since October to help whittle down the error rate. The state was also taking part in a mandatory federal corrective action plan.
“We just received our confirmed SNAP error rates for the month of August and we had already come down to 5.5%,” she said. “That just indicates that we were on the right path, and we still are on the right path to be able to bring the error rate down.”
Sen. Mike Thompson, the Shawnee Republican chairman of the Legislature’s audit committee, said he was concerned some applicants for SNAP weren’t being honest about personal information.
“To me, if that’s deliberate, that’s not error,” Thompson said. “That’s fraud.”
In Kansas, the average payment under SNAP for a family was about $360 per month. Benefits must be based on a household’s size and net income. Auditors said the most common error in Kansas was miscalculation of an applicant’s income. Discovery of SNAP payments made based on misreported income — most easily caught when DCF performed a six-month eligibility review — would be an example of a SNAP payment error.
The auditors said it was important to note that “not all errors are fraud” because fraud required deliberate misrepresentations, concealment or omission of information to gain a benefit.
The SNAP application form runs 36 pages and contains more than 200 questions. In 2025, about 188,000 Kansans received SNAP aid each month.
Rep. Kristey Williams, an Augusta Republican, said she was struck by DCF’s decision not to provide auditors with access to SNAP applications submitted by Kansans. DCF said such a disclosure to auditors would violate U.S. law.
“Did you ascertain that or did they tell you they could not because of federal law?” Williams said.
Zimmerman, who presented the audit to legislators, said legal counsel advised no exception existed in federal law to allow personal SNAP information to be shared with a state’s auditors.
“I’m intrigued by that because everything that I’m searching says that we should be able to have access to it,” Williams said. “Our audit reports are never going to be really fully accurate if we can’t actually see the applications.”
The audit said the error rate was elevated in Kansas because of DCF’s staff turnover rate of 30%, the complexity of the one-year training process for employees handling SNAP eligibility cases and inconsistency in inquiries by staff to verify eligibility for benefits.
Errors could occur at many points, auditors said. For example, some applications were submitted on paper and required hand-entering information into the computer system. The manual of rules for processing and verifying SNAP applications was nearly 700 pages in length, the audit said.
Auditors and DCF recommended the state invest in modification to the KEES computer network in an attempt to reduce errors. DCF said a “chatbot assistant” could be used by DCF staff to quickly reference details of eligibility rules as they processed applications. Use of a document scanning system that automatically populated information fields of online documents could reduce mistakes.
“Long-term planning includes the technology supports recommended by the auditors that create efficiencies and improve quality control detection,” said Laura Howard, secretary of DCF.
The cost of the proposed computer system upgrades related to SNAP would amount to $4.4 million over the next two years. In 2025 , the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $403 million on direct SNAP assistance in Kansas.
The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump put the state-by-state SNAP error rates under greater scrutiny. The law set cost-share penalties to states for error rates above 6%. If a state’s error rate exceeded 10% in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, 2027, that state would be required to cover 15% of SNAP program costs. In Kansas, that would amount to $60 million annually. A rate of 8% to 10% would result in a 10% state assessment and a rate of 6% to 8% would trigger a 5% state obligation.
The USDA funds the cost of SNAP benefits distributed by each state, and has paid half of each state’s administrative costs. In 2027, federal funding for administration costs is expected to be slashed to 25%. In Kansas, the auditors said that could increase state expenditures for administration of SNAP by $15 million to $20 million annually.
Auditors said they were working on the second piece of the SNAP audit, which centered on use of electronic debit transfer cards that recipients used to purchase food.
