CHFS says budget cuts drove the reorganization. It didn't dispute employees' warnings that local offices aren't equipped to take this on.
Two employees, from two different branches of Kentucky's Department for Community Based Services, told me the same thing this month, independently of each other: the team responsible for investigating welfare fraud and SNAP overpayments is being dismantled statewide. The workers who do that job are being moved into call center roles. Their caseloads are being handed off to local offices that don't currently do this kind of work.
The Cabinet for Health and Family Services has now confirmed the reorganization is happening.
One of the investigators I spoke with told me she's currently sitting on 137 open cases. Seventy-five of them are agency errors- mistakes made by the state itself, not by the people receiving benefits. Under the new structure, those errors would be investigated by staff working out of the same call centers responsible for making them in the first place.
"The people making the errors should not be the ones investigating them. That seems so obvious," one employee told me over the phone. She said local offices are "not trained enough to handle simple case processing much less complicated investigations for fraud and overpayments," and that they're already overwhelmed without adding this on top.
