From: Mary Riggen-Ver, Chief, Program Integrity and Analysis
Just a couple more months of the Preliminary Swim remain before we see some indication of how our salmon are starting out on their Successful Navigation to Awesome Performance. While some of you may be excited about this, others may be asking what on earth salmon have to do with program accuracy. The answer to that is nothing really. However, we are known world-wide for our wild Alaska salmon, and our state fish is the king salmon. So what better way to ride out the waves to awesome performance than with our winning Alaskan salmon?
It’s interesting to note that Bethel was first established by Yupik Eskimos who called the village “Mamterillermiut” meaning “Smokehouse People,” named for the nearby fish smokehouse. And Ketchikan is known as “The Salmon Capital of the World”.
There are surely many interesting tidbits about Alaska salmon (or our other fish). But to emphasize just how important our navigation to awesome performance is, consider how Food and Nutrition Services (FNS) applies the payment error rates to the total food stamp issuance to estimate the impact of the errors in terms of benefit dollars. Applying the error rate to the $94 million that Alaska issued in food stamps in FFY 2008 means that Alaska likely had over six million dollars in payment errors, almost three million dollars more than in FFY 2007. This includes both under and overpayment errors; client and agency caused.
Yes, our noble salmon have a challenging journey ahead. But we know that awesome performance is the way we want to navigate, and the type of service we want to deliver to our customers.
Have a wonderful holiday season, and a great and fun 2009!