The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill added penalties for states with high error rates in their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) programs. Currently, Oklahoma would be on the hook for the maximum penalty. It is estimated to be $226 million annually. 

One way to reduce Oklahoma’s SNAP error rate would be to end the Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility practice. BBCE allows states to raise the income and asset levels typically allowed to qualify for SNAP benefits. Not only does BBCE increase the risk of error, but it is also one of the reasons Oklahoma has more than 670,000 SNAP beneficiaries. That’s 17 percent of Oklahoma’s population, despite the state having a poverty rate of only 11.6 percent. 

There are nine states that don’t use BBCE, and eight of them have lower error rates than Oklahoma:

Alaska’s error rate of 24.66 percent is an outlier, as the state chose to bypass the verification process while working through a backlog of applications that began in 2022. This resulted in an error rate of 56.97% in 2022, compared to 11.19% in 2019.

Taking out Alaska’s data, the average error rate for the other eight states is 7.91 percent. Oklahoma currently has an error rate of 10.87 percent, with the national average being 10.93 percent.

This one change could go a long way in reducing Oklahoma’s error rate and avoiding a potential penalty of $226 million annually.

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