First Focus on Children submitted the following comment to Rohit Chopra, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau urging them to include Electronic Benefit Transfer (“EBT”) accounts within the scope of the final rule.
Excerpt from the Comment:
More than 14 million children across the country rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (“SNAP”) benefits, distributed and administered through EBT accounts, for access to nutritious food that they need to grow and thrive. 1 SNAP reduced food insecurity by 8.6% and lifted 1.4 million children out of poverty in 2022. 2 However, the EBT accounts managed by their parents are administered by for-profit EBT processors that are not required to provide account holders with reliable electronic access to their accounts. The inability to access their EBT account data may prevent parents from being able to adequately manage their SNAP dollars, meaning that they may unknowingly run out of funds, and food, before the end of the month. Due to a lack of security of EBT accounts, SNAP recipients may not be able to access their accounts and flag fraudulent transactions — a loss for both the government and children alike.