[dainbramaged]

The Papa Murphy’s pizza store in our small town has a “EBT cards accepted” sign in its window.

[WOBBLY BOB]

Could the states run the food stamp operation better with block grants? Last year, the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle Tribune found that retailers are ripping off the program, largely because the states are terrible at monitoring it.

In New Hampshire, of the 883 stores that take food stamp cards, only 18 were disqualified from the program since 2006. The story was similar in Massachusetts, where just 228 of the 4,320 stores authorized to accept food stamps were disqualified. By 2009, 90 of those Massachusetts retailers were back on the list of authorized food stamp merchants and had collectively racked up more than $7 million in food stamp redemptions in that one year alone, records obtained from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the $50 billion program, show.

"The biggest problem we have here in Massachusetts is that we can't prosecute because there is no state statute," said one Bay State investigator who has assisted federal agents in retailer investigations. "We couldn't even bring a case against them."

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2012/01/the_politics_of_food_stamps.shtml