Happy New Year Everyone. You all know that we have set improving work quality as a high priority for the Division of Public Assistance. Our Better than Average! campaign has set a goal of 93 percent Food Stamp Program payment accuracy by October 2004. We aim to finish the year below the National average error rate. We are starting to see improvement from your hard work and the quality initiatives that offices have put in place.
Though we finished Fiscal Year 2003 with the highest FS error rate in the nation at 13.6%, it was 10.6% during the last four months. This is a good indication that we are headed in the right direction. We're also hopeful that semi-annual reporting and our successful Quality Assessment Review Committee (QARC) will help to further increase our food stamp accuracy. That said, achieving our accuracy goal remains a major challenge for every region and office.
I want to acknowledge the fine performance results attained by several of our offices in the FFY 03 food stamp sample.
- Sitka office recorded perfect 100% accuracy!
- Southeast APA unit posted a 98.3% accuracy rate!
- Fairbanks APA unit attained a perfect 100% accuracy rate!
- Fairbanks staff handling District 44 rural FS caseload achieved 95.4% accuracy!
- Nome office earned a 95.8% accuracy rate!
- Coastal APA unit finished well with 94.4% accuracy!
Congratulations to these offices and all the staff that worked to make it happen.
We will soon be posting the early results of our FFY 04 quality assessment sample. Already, one-third of the annual sample months have been selected. A good start is essential to our success, and ongoing commitment to improved accuracy needs to stay in our focus. You can keep up on how well we, and your office are doing with our accuracy campaign on DPAWeb. Click on the Food Stamp Accuracy Campaign box at the top of the DPAWeb home page to get performance summaries and news.
Thank you all for your personal effort to lead us to our Better than Average! campaign goal of 93% Food Stamp payment accuracy in 2004.
Jim Dalman
Chief of Program Integrity and Analysis