Food stamps are paying for trans-Atlantic takeout — with New Yorkers using taxpayer-funded benefits to ship food to relatives in Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Welfare recipients are buying groceries with their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and packing them in giant barrels for the trip overseas, The Post found.
The practice is so common that hundreds of 45- to 55-gallon cardboard and plastic barrels line the walls of supermarkets in almost every Caribbean corner of the city.
The feds say the moveable feasts go against the intent of the $86 billion welfare program for impoverished Americans.
A spokeswoman for the US Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service said welfare benefits are reserved for households that buy and prepare food together. She said states should intervene if people are caught shipping nonperishables abroad.
Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, called it just another example of welfare abuse.
“I don’t want food-stamp police to see what people do with their rice and beans, but it’s wrong,” Tanner told The Post. “The purpose of this program is to help Americans who don’t have enough to eat. This is not intended as a form of foreign aid.”
The United States spent $522.7 million on foreign aid to the Caribbean last fiscal year, government data show.
Still, New Yorkers say they ship the food because staples available in the States are superior and less costly than what their families can get abroad.
“Everybody does it,” said a worker at an Associated Supermarket in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn. “They pay for it any way they can. A lot of people pay with EBT.”
Customers pay cash for the barrels, usually about $40, and typically ship them filled with $500 to $2,000 worth of rice, beans, pasta, canned milk and sausages.
Workers at the Pioneer Supermarket on Parkside Avenue and the Key Food on Flatbush Avenue confirmed the practice.
They said food-stamp recipients typically take home their barrels and fill them gradually over time with food bought with EBT cards.
When the tubs are full, the welfare users call a shipping company to pick them up and send them to the Caribbean for about $70. The shipments take about three weeks.
Last week, a woman stuffed dozens of boxes of macaroni and evaporated milk into a barrel headed for her family in Kingston, Jamaica. She said she didn’t have welfare benefits and bought the food herself.
“This is all worth more than $2,000,” she said. “I’ve been shopping since last December. You can help somebody else, someone who doesn’t live in this country.”
A man helping her pack the barrel said: “We’re poor here, and they’re poor. But what we can get here is like luxury to them.”
Uh, I have a problem with it. How much aid does that shithole of a country get from us as it is? If they're on assistance it should be because they cannot afford to feed themselves. Clearly if they're stuffing barrels full of non-perishables to send somewhere else they don't need to be on SNAP. There are people that actually need it and they end up getting fucked when benefits get cut because some politician gets a hair up his ass about people doing shit like this (see also: stories about welfare queens buying lobster dinners with EBT).
Kazuya Mishima wrote:they can pry the bacon from my cold dead hand.
"Many, many, working families qualify, they get some help in being able to purchase their food," said Linda Martin, deputy director of economic services at the Department of Social Services.
The assistances, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, makes navigating the grocery isle a little easier. It's essentially food stamps on an EBT card.
"Pretty much with the EBT card you can buy anything that's food or drink that you can eat," said Martin.
However, there are restrictions. You can't buy pet food, soaps, paper products, household supplies, prepared foods, vitamins, medicine, alcohol or tobacco.
So then why are places named Prime Tobacco & Beer Outlet, Anyday Inn and Store, Cooks Bakery that serves prepared food on the list?
"What we do find in South Carolina and in rural states, is that we have a lot of people that don't have an easy method of transportation. A lot of our clients shop at convenience stores when they need to," said Martin.
We questioned if these smaller stores are following the protocol laid out by the USDA. Turns out, that's where the greatest amount of fraud occurs. Get this, USDA statistics show fraud cases in South Carolina rose 1,000 percent from 2010 to 2011. Here's what's frightening: no ones keeping track of what's being bought with your tax dollars .
"We can tell the number of transactions, we can't tell what people buy, but we can tell the number of transactions at each store that's licensed for EBT," said Martin.
Ultimately, there's no way to see how your tax dollars are being spent. DSS tells us the EBT cards are coded and that's supposed to prevent the sale of unauthorized goods.
"Nobody would do that, because immediately it would -- the card won't scan, cigarettes, it won't allow," said Martin.
But we know the USDA catches some stores through undercover stings. Last year, 146 investigations were completed in the state and there were 15,000 investigations nationwide. Fifty-four retailers in South Carolina were sanctioned for program violations.
Jezzy Bell wrote:Uh, I have a problem with it. How much aid does that shithole of a country get from us as it is? If they're on assistance it should be because they cannot afford to feed themselves. Clearly if they're stuffing barrels full of non-perishables to send somewhere else they don't need to be on SNAP. There are people that actually need it and they end up getting fucked when benefits get cut because some politician gets a hair up his ass about people doing shit like this (see also: stories about welfare queens buying lobster dinners with EBT).
