Feds say RI owes $37.3M for food stamp overpayments during UHIP debacle. What happens now?

PROVIDENCE – The federal government has stepped up its effort to recoup $37.3 million in overpayments from the state that went out from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – formerly known as food stamps – during the botched Raimondo-era rollout of a new computerized eligibility-verification system known as “UHIP.”

The Rhode Island Department of Human Services received the overpayment claim from the U.S. Food and Nutrition Service on May 15 for benefits paid out between September 2016 and December 2019, when current U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was governor.

The dunning letter, signed by FNS regional administrator Lizbeth Silbermann and first reported by WPRI, directly attributes the $37,343,809.68 in overpayments to a “major systemic failure” in “the original implementation of the RIBridges integrated eligibility system – formerly referred to as the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP).”

The McKee administration is appealing.

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“After this administration came into office, we were made aware that [the Food and Nutrition Service] would be addressing this past issue with the state at a point in the future,” Department of Human Services spokesman James Beardsworth told The Journal on Friday.

“While FNS determined the specific technical issue was officially resolved by January 2020, it has taken some time for them to issue the findings just received. DHS disputes the claim and has filed an appeal,” Beardsworth said.

“When the new contract with the system vendor was entered into by this Administration, financial protections for the State were included in the agreement,” he said, without elaboration.

The botched 2016 rollout by the Raimondo administration of the new Deloitte-designed computerized eligibility-verification system left scores of struggling Rhode Islanders without benefits and others with double payments or letters telling them their very-much-alive children were dead.

The May 15 letter was not the first notice from the federal government that it was seeking repayment. Until now, the question was how much.

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On Aug. 23, 2017, the Food and Nutrition Service notified the Rhode Island Department of Human Services that the state was liable.

In 2018, the federal agency sent the state a running list of the problems thwarting access by some of the poorest people in Rhode Island to food stamps, including: “failure to close thousands of cases because of unprocessed re-certifications and periodic reports,” and other “persistent issues … resulting in inaccurate benefit issuances to thousands of households.”

“In 2019, FNS began calculating overpayment amounts and identified an initial $30,536,981 in overpayments stemming from DHS’s failure to properly recertify benefit recipients, an incorrectly timed benefit hike and “duplicate accounts.”

FNS was initially “unable to determine a final liability amount due to limitations with the data.”

In time, DHS identified an additional $6,806,828.68 in overpayments resulting from the delayed interface with other databases showing “death matches,” for example, and failure to count cash assistance from the “RIWorks” program as “unearned income in SNAP budgets.”