Ruidoso, NM — A newly released Legislative Finance Committee (LFC) audit, secured by Republican legislators in both the House and Senate during last year's special session, confirms what taxpayers across New Mexico have known for years. New Mexico's food assistance system is broken, being exploited by bad actors, and the people responsible for ensuring accuracy are enabling this fraud.
The audit found that New Mexico's SNAP payment error rate has climbed from a low of 3.7 percent in FY12 to approximately 16.6 percent in FY25, the fifth worst rate in the entire country. That is not a one-year problem. That is more than a decade of the error rate climbing every single year under this administration, while the people in charge of implementing the program seemingly took little or no action to remedy the problem.
Audit below
The Legislature has poured tens of millions of additional dollars into the Health Care Authority (HCA)'s Income Support Division, including a recent $51 million infusion for more caseworkers and technology. The audit found that none of it mattered. Caseloads went down while staffing increased. Despite these additional resources, New Mexico's error rate continued climbing significantly higher than the U.S. average.
"This audit doesn't describe a system that failed by accident. It describes a system that state officials allowed to fail, year after year, while they kept asking taxpayers for more money to fix a problem they were never seriously trying to fix," said Senate Republican Whip Pat Woods (R-Broadview). "When you let an error rate climb for over a decade, when you keep relying on the honor system instead of checking the facts, and when you keep handing out more money instead of demanding results, that is not incompetence anymore. That is enabling behavior. State officials enabled this, and now New Mexico taxpayers are on the hook for it."
The audit found New Mexico's payment errors are overwhelmingly overpayments, and that HCA has relied on self-reported information from recipients for some of the largest categories of errors, including household composition, without ever checking it against data the state already has access to, such as motor vehicle records or Medicaid files. The audit also found New Mexico has the lowest number of SNAP fraud disqualifications of any high-error state in the country, despite having the highest SNAP participation rate in the nation. New Mexico would have had roughly 480 disqualifications in FY23 if it matched the national average. Instead, it had only 18.
Because of its error rate, New Mexico now faces up to $173 million per year in new costs the state will have to backfill with state dollars, money that could otherwise go towards protecting vulnerable children in our state's disastrous Children, Youth, & Families Department (CYFD), expanding access to healthcare, or bolstering public safety. "Fraud and inaccuracy in our state's SNAP program doesn't just insult taxpayers, they also hurt the families truly in need of these resources," said Senator Craig Brandt (R-Rio Rancho), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. "Now, New Mexicans are being forced to pay even more of their hard-earned money for this complete and total failure by those in charge."
Republican lawmakers are calling on HCA to immediately eliminate self-reporting as a primary verification method, as recommended in the audit, and to begin checking household composition data against data collected by the motor vehicle division, Medicaid, and other agencies– just as other states already do. Republican lawmakers are also calling for independent audits of the HCA, with the results reported publicly to the Legislature every year so this widespread fraud can never again happen in the dark for over a decade.
New Mexicans deserve to know whether this was negligence or a deliberate choice to look the other way. Either way, the people responsible enabled this failure, and it is time for that to change.
