The holiday season is upon us and for the fortunate, it is a time to celebrate the good things in our lives — family, friends, health and a safe place to call home. For others, however, each carol and TV commercial brings a reminder of the security and comforts they lack.
How to keep the house warm? How to get the ingredients for a special meal? How to keep the kids from being disappointed? How to pay for a trip to the doctor’s office? Massachusetts has many religious and other non-profit organizations that help meet these needs, but these efforts must be supplemented by our government, which provides our social safety net.
For many, it is easy to dismiss our state’s social safety net as something that is only for others, in reality, many of our friends, family, and neighbors count on it to make ends meet. For example, nearly 800,000 Bay Staters receive food assistance through the SNAP program each month, accounting for $1.2 billion in benefits annually. More than a quarter of our state’s population receives health insurance coverage from MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, which makes up $13.6 billion in annual spending — roughly 38 percent of our state’s annual budget.
Helping to ensure that these programs operate with integrity is one of the roles played by the Office of the State Auditor. Fighting fraud is one way we do this. While fraud in our public benefits programs affects a small percentage of the total spending, it has an impact toward weakening public trust in the system. Last month, we announced that during Fiscal Year 2016, we identified a record amount of $15.4 million in public benefits fraud. This record finding does not mean that fraud is up in these programs, but rather is a reflection of our increased sophistication, driven by the use of data analytics and strategic partnerships.
However, identifying fraud is only one step in protecting our social safety net. Just as fraud weakens the programs, so, too, does an inability to access them by the people who need them. A June 2016 report from the USDA found that 17 percent of eligible individuals do not access food assistance benefits. The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute estimates that in Massachusetts alone, 575,000 MassHealth recipients may be eligible for food assistance that are not receiving it.
We must do more to understand why these gaps exist. We need to understand if there are cultural, technological, bureaucratic or other barriers preventing individuals from accessing benefits. It’s with this in mind, that in the coming year, my office will begin an audit to understand these gaps, and provide suggestions to close them.
As we gather with loved ones this season, we should give thanks for the things and people in our lives, but we must not forget those who struggle. We have an obligation to the people of this great commonwealth to strengthen our state’s social safety net by ensuring that these programs are run with integrity and are accessible to those who need them.
Suzanne M. Bump is auditor for the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts.