The United States Department of Agriculture has sent a team, headed by USDA Inspector General John Walk, to Puerto Rico to examine reports of fraud in Puerto Rico’s Nutrition Assistance Program (NAP). This is the Island’s equivalent of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Puerto Rico’s Comptroller had produced a report in March saying that $150 million in NAP benefits had been paid out to nearly 39,000 individuals who were in fact deceased. 34 cases were still open as of the publication of the report.
NAP recipients are required to report any changes in household composition, including deaths, within 30 days. In addition, ADSEF, the agency in charge of NAP, is required to compare official registers of deaths with their rolls on a monthly basis and to validate these findings at least once each year. Questions linger over how the improper payments could have happened and whether Puerto Rico is truly an outlier nationwide on programmatic fraud.
How bad is it?
The time period covered in the report stretched from 2017, the year Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, to 2022, as the COVID pandemic continued to affect the world. The comptroller’s report points to the upheaval of these events as a likely reason for the failure to keep records up to date.
“The foregoing does not exempt employees and officials from their responsibilities after these events,” the report acknowledges.
Former Secretary of the Department of the Family Gonzalez Magaz noted that automatic discontinuation of benefits based on the Death Registry can result in an end to benefits for people who are still alive, since errors can be made, especially at times of crisis such as the pandemic and natural disasters. Taking the time to validate deaths before ending benefits is essential.
The report also pointed out that roughly half of the benefits disbursed were not in fact used. NAP funds are deposited to existing NAP cards each month. Deceased people’s surviving family members may not have realized that their loved one had a NAP card or may not have known the funds were being added to the card’s balance.
This suggests that errors may not have initially been cases of fraud, though some cards continued to be used after the individuals were deceased. In addition, some government benefit programs (Social Security, for example) are supposed to be adjusted automatically and do not require action by family members. Equally, people who did not have close family members may simply have had no one to alert the ADSEF officers of the death. Nonetheless, improper payments appear to have been distributed in Puerto Rico.
Is this a problem in Puerto Rico only?
A U.S. Government Accountability Office report in 1998 found that 26,000 deceased individuals had received U.S. nutrition assistance payments in the preceding year in four states. The GAO at that time recommended giving up the manual checks and matching of records used to find deceased recipients, and suggested a simpler and more practical method.
More recently, a 2025 report from the Congressional Research Service identified multiple types of fraud, errors, and theft of benefits in the SNAP program, with losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
There is clearly evidence of fraud in the U.S. SNAP program as well as in Puerto Rico’s NAP program. Cases of fraud in Puerto Rico have resulted in stricter oversight, as in the response to Hurricane Maria, in which the GAO stated that extra red tape slowed the federal disaster response. NAP is not equal to SNAP, and the lack of oversight in NAP, an outlier program to the federal standard, could even encourage fraud. Or inefficiency in the territorial government could be easier to overlook because of the separation of the territory from the federal government. Since data collection in Puerto Rico is also not equal to that in the states, it is even possible that limited information stands in the way of accuracy in record keeping.
The bottom line is that there is evidence of fraud in both Puerto Rico and the 50 states. The best response may be what is already underway: examination of the current processes and updates to improve them.
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