Well Prepared: A Disaster Benefits System Thought Leadership Paper

Louisiana is no stranger to natural disasters. In September 2008, Hurricane Gustav tore through the state, wreaking havoc. The fear of mass flooding and an already fragile infrastructure weren't the only challenges Gustav threw at Louisiana when it swept through the state. The storm also forced the state's Department of Social Services (DSS) to take a hard look at the way it distributed benefits through its federally funded Disaster Food Stamps program, which provides money for groceries to eligible households that have lost income or suffered damage in a disaster.

After Gustav, more than 2 million people applied for Disaster Food Stamps, converging at the 60 locations the state set up to take their applications. These applications came on top of Louisiana's nearly 1 million people in the regular food stamp program.

At the Disaster Food Stamp centers, people stood in line for hours, waiting to talk with DSS employees, complete paperwork and present income verification. Then the applicants faced a second wait. DSS shipped their paperwork to a data processing center, where employees entered the information, and the computer system determined eligibility. Next, the system transmitted data on eligible households in batches to JPMorgan Chase, which uploaded the benefits to individuals' electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards. Only then - three or four days after they filled out their applications - could residents start using their cards to buy food.

While citizens made do for several days without disaster benefits, DSS wrestled with technology challenges. Due to the huge number of applications it needed to process, the computer system crashed several times, further slowing the benefits process. The overwhelming volume also caused the system to commit occasional errors, such as issuing too much money to some EBT cards, or issuing duplicate benefits to about 22,000 people.

So severe was the negative response to these problems that some department leaders resigned. With a strong desire to better serve citizens of Louisiana and a commitment to resolve the process and technology issues prior to the start of the next hurricane season, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal appointed Kristy Nichols as the new secretary of DSS in late 2008. Nichols' department started making changes to ensure that the next time it issued disaster benefits, Louisiana would do a more efficient and effective job and the mistakes of hurricanes Katrina and Gustav would not be repeated.

"We wanted to be able to process applications and load benefits more quickly," Nichols said. DSS believes the changes will reduce the long lines and wait times, improve data accuracy and implement new safeguards against fraud. "We also didn't want to experience the same problems with our mainframe, which wasn't prepared to take large volumes of applications," she said.

Pre-Registration

To achieve those goals, DSS decided to develop an automated, customer-centric Disaster Food Stamps system that included a pre-registration process. Even before a hurricane or other disaster hit Louisiana, residents could go online or use a call center to submit information that the state would need to process their applications. This citizen self-service solution would encourage the proactive management of an individual situation, and would lead to more accurate data through a self-application process. "We felt that was one way to reduce wait times and promote an individual's responsibility to be prepared," Nichols said.

In the event of a disaster, applicants still would need to visit a DSS site to show supporting documents and go through the required face-to-face interview. But the number of sites has increased, and pre-registered applicants could use a fast-moving express line. And the registration system would already have much of their information.

The technology to support this new customer-centric strategy needed to meet some exacting criteria. DSS was working with a limited budget. Time was tight as well. DSS was starting the project in December 2008, and it