Welfare’s New Look: Photos, Fingerprints

When Lilia Sanchez returned recently to collect food stamps and cash assistance for her family of four at a welfare office in Santa Ana, she had to place her index fingers on a digital scanner and peer into a camera.

With a few clicks of a computer mouse, a social worker captured Sanchez’s fingerprints and image, then sent them electronically to a database in Sacramento to be checked for duplicates.

“Some people may worry if they have something to hide,” said the 42-year-old mother from Santa Ana, who is among the first wave of Orange County aid recipients to be checked as part of a statewide program to prevent welfare fraud. “We have nothing to hide.”

Advocates for the poor had expressed concerns that many eligible parents would so fear that their personal records would be shared with other governmental agencies that they would not seek aid to feed their families. But with people such as Sanchez showing their willingness to be fingerprinted and photographed, evidence is growing that few have been scared away, state and local officials say.

Under terms of a 1996 law, the state this year began requiring recipients of food stamps and many other types of welfare to be photographed and fingerprinted to catch those who illegally apply for aid several times in different counties or under different names.

Statewide, half of the nearly 1 million families receiving food stamps or aid under the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids, or CalWORKs, program have been fingerprinted so far. Counties also have the option of fingerprinting and photographing general-relief recipients, who generally make up only a small portion of the welfare caseload.

Still, some contend the effort is intrusive and an unnecessary burden on those most in need--a requirement that could keep away legitimate aid seekers, especially immigrants, in droves.

“Now we are treating food-stamp recipients like criminals,” said George Manalo-LeClair, a policy director at the San Francisco-based California Food Policy Advocates. “We are talking about vulnerable people, people with [few] options.”

Welfare officials around the state, however, report little visible effect on caseloads. Counties have dropped a small number of recipients from the rolls for failing to submit to the new requirement. But officials say it is impossible to tell how many of those were would-be cheaters, former recipients who no longer needed assistance or eligible people scared off by the identification process.

Sacramento County, one of the first to implement the program, has fingerprinted 29,000 of its 34,300 existing welfare cases since March, removing about 1.4% so far for failure to comply with the identification requirement.

Orange County mailed a batch of appointment notices in July to 5,500 households collecting food stamps and benefits under the CalWORKs welfare-to-work program. Less than 1%, or 41 families, failed to comply. Officials said they expect to fingerprint the remainder of the county’s 41,000 cases by next year without significant drops in the rolls.

San Diego County reported discontinuing benefits to 46 households since June. It has completed fingerprinting and photographing about a third of its 35,500 caseload.

The $58-million state program is modeled after a Los Angeles County system that has been fingerprinting its welfare recipients since 1991. The county will convert to the state system, with photographs, sometime next year, officials said.

Los Angeles officials hail the system, estimating it has saved more than $75 million since 1991 by deterring and detecting fraud. State experts expect the new identity checks will save taxpayers $200 million over four years.

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At first, many social workers privately grumbled about the requirement, saying the amount of fraud to be detected wasn’t worth such Draconian measures. But some now are sighing with relief.

“We were worried that they wouldn’t show up in droves and that we would lose half of our caseloads,” said Janice Robb, a project leader for the Orange County Social Services Agency. That didn’t happen, she said.

Welfare agency officials credit outreach, in part, for what appears to be a low dropout rate. Most counties began spreading the word through community-based and religious groups and explaining that information would not be shared with outside agencies. Those who made it to the offices seemed unfazed.

But critics remain concerned the identification requirement will dissuade families not already in the system. They argue that collecting fingerprints and photos akin to mug shots brings shame to people already stigmatized by poverty.

Moreover, they say, many immigrants fear the collected information will be shared with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services, even though the law forbids it.

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for aid, but they must still be fingerprinted in order to collect benefits for their citizen children. Most legal immigrants do not qualify for federal aid, but they may qualify for state-funded programs.

Advocates say many in immigrant communities erroneously believe that seeking public aid can hurt their chances of becoming naturalized citizens. And the undocumented live in a constant state of fear that they will be deported.

“The goal of the government is to help families in need, not to scare them away,” said Tanya Broder, an attorney for the National Immigration Law Center.

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Broder and others say welfare reform in general has had a disproportionate effect on immigrants and that the new law only adds another barrier. A 1998 study by the Urban Institute showed a 23% drop since 1996 in the number of immigrants seeking public aid in Los Angeles County, despite the fact that many were still eligible for help.

A recent report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that between 1994 and 1998, legal immigrants and their American-born children had the largest drop in food-stamp program participation: 83% and 75%, respectively. The drop for the total population for the same period was 29%.

“It can’t be all because of the booming economy,” Broder said. “People are eligible for benefits, but there is a chilling effect when you place a variety of barriers, and finger-imaging is just another.”

The USDA also found that states now using finger-imaging technology for food-stamp recipients detected very little multiple-aid fraud, a rate of 1 in 500,000 cases.

“Introduction of a finger-imaging requirement reduces participation by approximately 1.3%,” the December study reads. “However, this estimate reflects both reduced fraud and deterrence of eligible individuals and households.”

More recently, 22% of 309 Latino immigrants surveyed in San Jose by an advocacy group said they would not seek aid even if they needed it because of the identification program.

“We feel this is unnecessary,” said Lisa Castellanos, a director with Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network, which conducted the survey over the summer. “It is a bad program all around. There are already so many other barriers for immigrants.”

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In August, a Sacramento-based legal center filed a lawsuit against the state, challenging the requirement that adults be fingerprinted even if they’re seeking aid only for their children and not themselves.

“It is bad public policy to be deterring aid for children who are lawfully entitled to it,” said Stephen Goldberg, an attorney with the Northern California Lawyers for Civil Justice, which filed the suit.

Welfare officials note that those who fall off the rolls out of fear of fingerprinting can, and do, reapply. It is a delicate balance that must be struck, they say, to ensure only those who need help get it.

“We have two goals that sometimes are conflicting,” said Rebecca Fuller, a Sacramento social worker. “One is accuracy, to make sure that we are delivering services only to those who need them. The other is accessibility, so everyone who is eligible receives them. The two are not always compatible.”