Illinois House OKs studying cost of ID photos on food stamp cards
BY DAVE MCKINNEY AND STEPHEN DI BENEDETTO Staff Reporters April 12, 2011 5:40PM
Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM
SPRINGFIELD — After a stormy debate, the Illinois House voted Tuesday to commission a study on how expensive it would be to put photos on the ATM-like cards used for food stamps and cash assistance.
Designed to combat fraud, the legislation, which passed 64-48 and now moves to the Senate, would give the Department of Human Services six months to report back to the Legislature with an estimate and to figure out how caregivers could buy groceries for their clients with so-called Link cards bearing the clients’ photos.
“All it does is gather facts. Why would anyone be against facts?” Rep. Chapin Rose (R-Mahomet), the bill’s chief House sponsor, said of his legislation.
There are about 880,000 Link recipients in Illinois who use the ATM-like card to buy food or receive cash assistance through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
A family of three with $1,984 in monthly household income or less, for example, receives $526 in federally subsidized food-stamp benefits that are programmed into the Link card each month.
The mere effort to launch a study into putting photos on the cards provoked an angry outcry from several Chicago Democrats who viewed Rose’s initiative as a stigmatizing assault on the disadvantaged.
“Are you picking on poor people, representative?” demanded Rep. Ken Dunkin (D-Chicago), who voted against the measure and acknowledged during floor debate that he grew up in a home receiving welfare benefits.
Rose, who denied being insensitive to the poor, later told colleagues that he too grew up in a needy home after his mother was laid off from her job and before she “bootstrapped herself up from the bottom” by going to college.
“I’m not going to allow them to make that accusation, because I’ve been there,” he said.
A slew of anti-poverty and anti-hunger groups opposed his bill, as did the city of Chicago and the Illinois Retail Merchants Association.
“This bill ... is the most wasteful spending of our time in state government,” said Rep. Sara Feigenholtz (D-Chicago), whose statement drew applause from Democratic colleagues.
“This bill will spend $2 to $4 million and waste a ton of time of the Department of Human Services,” she said.
Rose disputed that cost total and insisted his legislation seeking a study would carry only a “minimal fiscal impact” by the Department of Human Services’ own estimates.
The department informed lawmakers that producing Link cards with photo IDs and acquiring the equipment to do so could cost as much as $4 million – though under Rose’s bill, the Legislature would have to hold a separate vote on moving ahead with that program after completion of the cost study.
In making his fraud pitch, Rose pointed to a Michigan case where college students obtained federal loans for their tuition, room and board and also acquired food stamps to buy beer.
The Department of Human Services minimized the volume of fraud associated with the Link card, noting that only 786 Link card recipients — about 1 percent of the overall total of cardholders — lost their benefits this year because of misuse. Rose, however, estimated fraud in Illinois’ welfare system could reach as much as $1.5 billion, though he did not provide direct evidence during floor debate. Rose later said that he was applying a federal estimate on the rate of fraud nationally to Illinois’ system.
“I’d note that’s about 25 percent of the most recent tax increase. It’s well over the cuts to developmental disability providers. It’s well over the zeroing out of budgets to drug-treatment providers. If you want to do some of those things or be responsible to taxpayers in the first place, we should be about the business of fighting fraud,” he said.
The contentious Link card vote followed earlier floor action in which the House approved legislation to end 72-hour waiting periods to buy a gun for state FOID cardholders who have obtained an interim or plenary order of protection.
“This is going to help people, typically woman, protect themselves when the police can’t be there to protect them,” said Rep. David Harris (R-Arlington Heights), who was the chief House sponsor of the bill that passed 78-34 and now moves to the Senate.
Gun-control advocates disputed that assertion.
“What you are creating is a loophole to our already porous gun-control laws, and I fear we’re not going to provide any additional help to victims of domestic violence,” said Rep. Will Burns (D-Chicago), the 4th Ward alderman-elect.
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