Today the Division of Public Assistance was recognized for its outstanding achievements in attaining the highest accuracy rate in the nation in determining food stamp benefit payments for Alaskans.

Today, the Division of Public Assistance is being recognized for its outstanding achievements in attaining the highest accuracy rate in the active food stamp payment category and finishing second in the negative payment accuracy category.

This is a monumental day for the Division of Public Assistance. This morning I was officially informed that, as anticipated, DPA had the best Food Stamp Program (aka SNAP) payment accuracy in the nation during federal fiscal year 2011. Alaska’s active payment error rate reported by FNS was 0.76%; in other words the sampled cases were 99.24% accurate.

For several years the Division has been advocating heavily to replace the Eligibility Information System (EIS) used to determine eligibility for thousands of people and to issue over $25 million in cash and food benefits alone each month. EIS has been a powerful tool and the backbone of our core business. Almost 30 years old, EIS’ cannot keep up with the demands created by growing workloads, changing policies and more and new federal mandates that require states to stand up systems capable of supporting real-time interfaces, online applications, client portals, and other modern functionality.

The CCPO is excited to announce issuance of Grant Awards for the Fiscal Year 2013 – 2015 grant cycle to successful applicants for the administration of the Child Care Assistance Program.