20 January 2010
Took the Broad Street line to work. I sat down with Rachel to talk about some new policy changes. Categorical Eligibility has now been expanded to anyone receiving TANF funded services. This is one of the tricks that I love about the people that work on Food Stamps. They got TANF to send a ton of people brochures using TANF money. This means that these people received a TANF service. So instead of the normal eligibility, the income limit goes up to 200% of the poverty limit. The net income does not matter. This only applies for 1 and 2 person households. Another change was that we do not pro-rateSUA (Standard Utility Allowance) if the applicant is an immigrant applying for their children. You do prorate their income and expenses.
Best Guess: 150,000 eligible non-participants in Philadelphia (down roughly 50,000 from when I started last year). There are over 400,000 participants in the program currently.
Here are some procedural changes concerning expedited cases. They are supposed to be processed within 5 calendar days. We now suggest that they go in on the second day. They should talk with the CSR (Customer Service Rep) to sign the signature page. To obtain their emergency food stamps, they need to bring their eform number and a state issued ID. If the recipient is homebound, they are supposed to fax in their ID. This is strange to me. Maybe I'm making a big leap here, but if someone qualifies for emergency food stamps, they might not have a fax machine.
For the rest of the day I did follow up work for Margaret.
