(CAPITOL CITY NOW) – Illinois needs to get its act together on calculating SNAP benefits accurately. SNAP is the federal food stamp program.

The Civic Federation has a new examination of the state’s SNAP error rate, which rose from 11.56 percent in Fiscal Year 2024 to 14.67 percent in Fiscal Year 2025.

“States have long been evaluated in terms of the rates at which they inadvertently make overpayments to SNAP participants as well as underpayments. It’s important to underscore that the payment error rate is not a measure of fraud; it is one measure of program implementation effectiveness,” said study author Paula Worthington, a senior policy advisor at the federation.

“There’s an overall context in which that is happening,” said Worthington, cautioning against viewing SNAP or other programs in silos. “We’ve made significant changes to the social safety net in many respects. Of course, Medicaid is a lot bigger than SNAP, and that’s a big, big piece of it; so the job is not just to pay attention to the details in a particular instance but to understand how they fit together in the whole picture.”

The Illinois Department of Human Services has a challenge in trying to make this right. “It’s going to fall to them to make the magic happen,” said Worthington, “that is, to do better with less.”