Lofty Heights

The best part of my work month is announcing the praiseworthy achievements of division staff. Once again you’ve lifted our Food Stamp Program payment accuracy rate a notch higher. We set our Give Me Five work quality improvement campaign goal at 95%, and our accuracy rate for the first seven months of this sample year is now 96.5%. This ranks us highly among the states, and also places us in great position to compete for a “most improved accuracy” performance bonus award if we can sustain our progress for a few more months. Arguably, it is harder to win this type of bonus when we finished the prior year with a pretty low error rate. Amazingly, your good work still has us right in the hunt. And here’s another good reason for us to finish strong. Most of the states vying for the accuracy bonuses at this point are relatively small, which can means a bigger bonus share for the winners. (So let’s stay ahead of those overly-tanned ETs in Florida.)

All of our regions are doing very well and contributing to excellent statewide performance.

Southeast is still at 100% accuracy. The Northern Region is up to 97.5%. The Central Region has a great 96.2% accuracy rate, lifted helpfully by the Mat-Su offices 99.1% accuracy. Coastal is well above our target goal with 95.5%.

Thanks for the great effort everyone.

From: Jim Dalman, Chief, Program Integrity and Analysis