Fiscal Year 2020 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Quality Control Database

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest of the domestic nutrition assistance programs administered by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), providing millions of Americans with the means to purchase food for a nutritious diet. During fiscal year (FY) 2020, SNAP served an average of 39.9 million people monthly and paid out $74.2 billion in benefits, which includes the cost of emergency allotments to supplement SNAP benefits due to the COVID-19 public health emergency.
In response to legislative adjustments to program rules and changes in economic and demographic trends, the characteristics of SNAP participants and households and the size of the SNAP caseload change over time. To quantify these changes or estimate the effect of adjustments to program rules on the current SNAP caseload, FNS relies on data from the SNAP Quality Control (QC) database. This database is an edited version of the raw data file of monthly case reviews conducted by State SNAP agencies to assess the accuracy of eligibility determinations and benefit calculations for each State’s SNAP caseload.
The COVID-19 public health emergency resulted in an incomplete FY 2020 sample in the raw data file. FNS granted States temporary waivers on conducting QC reviews starting in March 2020. Very few States collected QC data from March 2020 through May 2020. Most States opted to conduct QC reviews from June 2020 through September 2020, although FNS was unable to provide its usual level of oversight of the sampling procedures. Furthermore, monthly State samples for this time period were often smaller than usual.
This dataset includes separate SNAP QC files for FY 2020. The first covers the “pre-pandemic” period of October 2019 through February 2020. The second covers the “waiver” period of June 2020 through September 2020 for the 47 States and territories that provided sufficient data for at least one of those months.