Puerto Rico Paid $150.66 Million in Food Aid to Dead People

Puerto Rico's Nutrition Assistance Program (NAP, or PAN in Spanish) is the federal food-assistance benefit that replaces SNAP in the territory -- a fixed USDA block grant rather than an open-ended entitlement.▸ A compliance audit by the Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico, covering January 2017 through August 2024, found that the Department of the Family's Administración de Desarrollo Socioeconómico de la Familia (ADSEF) issued 988,617 NAP payments totaling $150,663,786 to 38,618 participants whose Social Security number matched a person recorded as deceased in Puerto Rico's Demographic Registry. The Comptroller issued an Adverse Opinion -- the audit's most severe finding -- concluding ADSEF's death-matching controls and its oversight of group homes receiving NAP funds on residents' behalf did not comply, in all significant respects, with applicable law.

Rather than rely on the death-record match alone, auditors pulled 385 of the 38,618 flagged cases -- 290 individual beneficiaries and 95 family units -- and checked what had actually happened to each one.▸ They found 10,700 payments totaling $1,623,280 issued across the sample between January 2017 and August 2024. Of the 290 single-beneficiary cases, 256 (88%) had eventually been closed, but not before 4,035 payments worth $435,579 went out first -- to people the Demographic Registry recorded as having died as long ago as 1991. The other 34 single-beneficiary cases were still open as of September 30, 2024, despite recorded dates of death running from 1990 to 2022; those still-active cases had already received 3,332 payments worth $437,035. A third category -- 95 family units where one member had died but the household's benefit wasn't adjusted -- received 3,333 payments worth $750,665 before ADSEF corrected the cases.

ADSEF's written response to the audit didn't dispute the $150,663,786 finding directly -- it re-analyzed all 38,618 flagged participants itself and offered a narrower number.▸ By the agency's own accounting, 16,970 of the flagged participants never had their benefits used after the recorded date of death, and another 5,330 couldn't be confirmed as actually deceased at all (their Social Security number and birth date matched a death record, but the name did not). Together, ADSEF says, those 22,300 participants represent $111,655,221 -- money it argues wasn't misused post-mortem, or wasn't tied to a real death at all. That leaves 16,318 cases, totaling $38,066,794 in payments, that ADSEF concedes did see benefit use after the participant's date of death -- though the agency says only $27,706,917 of that -- about 73% -- was actually spent post-mortem, without explaining what happened to the remaining $10.36 million.

ADSEF's two rebuttal categories, added together, come to $149,722,015 -- $941,771 short of the $150,663,786 the Comptroller's audit found.▸ The agency's own defense does not explain the gap; the audit report does not reconcile it either. Whatever the true figure, ADSEF's rebuttal traces the confirmed post-mortem spending to two distinct windows: disbursements to 3,139 participants happened while ADSEF had an active data-sharing agreement with the Demographic Registry in place to catch deaths, and disbursements to 13,179 participants happened during stretches when no such agreement existed at all -- a gap in the very data pipeline the audit's first objective was built to test, the federal Deceased Matching System required under 7 CFR 272.14.

The audit's second finding concerns a separate population: 25 transitional-residency institutions -- group homes for minors, the elderly, people with disabilities or substance-use disorders, HIV/AIDS patients, and domestic-violence survivors -- that ADSEF authorizes to receive NAP funds directly on residents' behalf.▸ Auditors tested just 6 of the 25 and still could not get the full paper trail: ADSEF couldn't locate or produce 36 of the required quarterly spending reports from 5 of those 6 institutions at all. Of the 73 reports that were produced, institutions reported $1,165,879 in NAP benefits received on residents' behalf -- $1,083,030 recorded as spent and $82,849 left as surplus. But ADSEF's certifying office never suspended the 5 institutions that, between them, failed to submit 61 required reports; four of them missed 56 consecutive quarters, and one didn't catch up until May 2024, when it submitted 17 reports covering more than four years at once.

The reports that did arrive showed where the money went.▸ Five institutions' 32 reports included receipts for liquor, wine, makeup, clothing, footwear, pet treatments, fumigation services, televisions, personal hygiene items, gasoline, utility bills, vehicle maintenance, hardware, perfume, electronic accessories, highway-toll charges, and bank fees on the very account holding the NAP funds -- none of it food. One institution's five reports included receipts from stores in the continental United States and in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Three more institutions submitted 42 reports with receipts too illegible to read, and two submitted 21 reports with no receipts included at all.

ADSEF's response pointed to staffing strain: former Secretary Rodríguez Troche, responding to this finding, said the agency's caseworkers carry an average of about 1,300 cases each, against a roughly 700-case national average.▸ A separate management comment on the deceased-payments finding -- from a different former Secretary, García Fuentes, whose remarks a footnote says apply to both findings -- cited staffing shortages compounded by Hurricanes Irma and Maria, southwestern Puerto Rico's earthquakes, and COVID-19, all occurring between 2017 and 2020.

NAP is entirely federal money -- a USDA block grant that replaces SNAP in Puerto Rico, which does not operate in the territory.▸ That makes ADSEF's control failures a federal oversight matter, not just a local one. USDA's Office of Inspector General says it is reviewing the Comptroller General's findings, will use its audit and investigative authority, and will pursue enforcement action against anyone who used false identities to divert the funds, calling payment of benefits to deceased individuals "a serious concern to program integrity." Inspector General John Walk, in a separate statement, thanked Puerto Rico's Comptroller General's office for the findings and said OIG "stand[s] ready to partner with authorities in Puerto Rico, other territories, and the states on strengthening integrity and accountability in the administration of public assistance funds."

ADSEF's current administration told auditors it has begun formalizing a permanent data-sharing agreement with the Demographic Registry, tightening internal verification, and drafting a corrective action plan -- the same fix the agency says it lacked, on and off, for years while $38 million kept moving through dead participants' cases.