A sign advertises that SNAP benefits are accepted at a Hornbacher’s in north Fargo, North Dakota, on July 7, 2026. (Photo by Ceilidh Kern/For the North Dakota Monitor)
BISMARCK (North Dakota Monitor) – Nearly one in 10 approved Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program applications in North Dakota in 2025 had some kind of error.
Under a federal law passed last year, that means the state may have to pay 10% of its residents’ benefits — or nearly $13 million — every fiscal year unless it can bring its error rate below 6%.
A SNAP payment error occurs when a household receives more or fewer benefits than it’s entitled to because of a mistake in the process. It’s not a measure of fraud. In 2025, 9.89% of SNAP approvals in North Dakota over- or underestimated a household’s benefits.
SNAP, previously known as food stamps, supplements low-income households’ food budgets.
House Resolution 1, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, was signed into law in July 2025. It requires states with payment error rates over 6% to pay a percentage of their residents’ benefits, with higher-error states paying more.
Rebecca Askins, interim director of the North Dakota Department of Health and Human Services’ Economic Assistance Section, told the Monitor that states will be able to base future payments off of their rate from either fiscal year 2025 or fiscal year 2026.
That means that if North Dakota can lower its error rate to between 6% and 7.99% over the next year, its share would be reduced to $6.4 million. If it can get its rate below 6%, it will not have to pay anything toward residents’ benefits.
The federal fiscal year ends in September, so states will have to begin making payments in October 2027. Askins told the Monitor that states are waiting for information from the federal Food and Nutrition Administration about how payments will work, including if they will pay costs monthly or in one lump sum.
While it’s possible the state will bring its rate down enough to not have to share benefit costs, if it doesn’t, payments will begin a few months after the 2027 state legislative session ends. That means the department will have to request any money it may need for that payment before the year’s error rate is finalized.
The department is planning to request funding for any cost-share penalties as part of its upcoming budget request, but the amount is not yet finalized, Askins wrote in an email.
In addition to possibly having to share the cost of benefits, the department will also have to pay for more of its administrative costs.
Previously, states paid 50% of the cost of administering their state programs and the federal government covered the other 50%. But under the federal law passed last year, states will now have to cover 75% of those costs.
The department currently spends around $19 million per biennium to administer the SNAP program, but exactly how much more it will have to pay is still being determined, as some parts of the program will remain at the 50-50 funding split, Askins wrote in an email.
North Dakota’s long-term error rate challenges
North Dakota’s error rate steadily declined between the late 1990s and early 2010s, reaching a low of 1.73% in 2014 before it began climbing again, according to state data. The state’s rate nearly doubled following the COVID-19 pandemic.
While North Dakota’s 2025 rate is only slightly above the national median, it’s significantly higher than some regional neighbors, including South Dakota and Wyoming, which had rates of 2.47% and 3.96%, respectively.
During a budget committee meeting June 24, state Rep. Eric Murphy, R-Grand Forks, asked Askins about this discrepancy.
“What are they doing right that we’re not doing?” Murphy said.
Askins replied that “usually there’s a correlation between the regulations or the programs they offer.”
She said offering more services can mean more regulations, more training and more operational challenges than running “a basic federal SNAP program.” She added that the “timing was just challenging” to roll out the changes made by the 2025 law and the training and systems updates needed to implement them.
Askins told the Monitor that besides implementing recent changes, the state has faced “the perfect storm of operational challenges but also workforce turnover.”
In 2019, state lawmakers approved a law dividing the state into 19 multi-county “human service zones” that took over responsibility for helping residents access services like SNAP from county social service offices.
That spurred “top-to-bottom changes in how local services are delivered” and led to “transitional friction” that contributed to the increase in the error rate prior to the pandemic, Askins said.
Then, during the pandemic, the department saw significant employee turnover, including among staff who determine eligibility for programs like SNAP.
“Our eligibility-worker tenure dropped by approximately a full decade,” Askins said. “That was a lot of critical veteran experience all at once.”
Askins told lawmakers that the agency caused 52% of the state’s errors and households caused 48%, which she said was “fairly common nationally.”
Most errors were caused by inaccurate household income information, Askins said, adding that nuances of things like housing costs and child support also complicate eligibility.
Askins told the Monitor that quality checks were able to identify errors that eligibility staff were not because “quality control typically has a higher threshold and standard on verifications that is different than something that an eligibility worker would use.”
She told lawmakers the department was taking steps to address the issues underlying the error rate, including completely rewriting the state’s SNAP policy manual to help staff navigate new federal regulations and launching “pre-authorization quality checks” to prompt staff to double-check applications before approving them.
The department will also implement artificial intelligence and a “quality assurance management system” to catch errors before approval, Askins said.
As for how much these changes are expected to cost, the department is “still meeting with vendors to get that estimate,” according to Askins.
During the committee meeting, Sen. Sean Cleary, R-Bismarck, raised concerns about an online platform called SPACES — short for Self-Service Portal And Consolidated Eligibility System — which houses the state’s eligibility systems for SNAP and Medicaid.
“We spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it a few years ago, and then I look back at the chart, and our payment error rate basically doubled since then,” Cleary said. “When I see this slide (saying) we’re going to ask for more funding for this IT project after it’s probably been one of the most expensive in state history, that’s just fairly frustrating.”
Askins told the Monitor the platform is in a “continuous state of updates” because of changing regulations, but that updates can be delayed, particularly when there are changes to SNAP and Medicaid at the same time, like with the 2025 law.
Rep. Jon Nelson, R-Rugby, the committee’s vice chairman, echoed Cleary’s concerns about the platform and asked Askins “who do we need to jack up to find some responsibility for its lack of performance?”
Askins replied that the department is having those conversations with the SPACES vendor and that she is “incredibly encouraged” by those efforts.
She told lawmakers she is optimistic that with the changes coming over the next fiscal year, the department will begin to see the error rate go down soon. But she said further changes at the federal level could complicate the department’s efforts and affect that timeline.
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