Soap, paper towels, a hot sandwich. The term depends on which.
This is the charge most stores actually get. Not cash for benefits - a pattern of ringing up things SNAP doesn’t cover. Paper goods, cleaning supplies, pet food, cigarettes, beer, hot prepared food eaten in the store. The sanction isn’t permanent, and that’s the whole opportunity: where your case lands on the ladder is argued, not fixed, and the difference between six months and three years is the record you file in ten days.
We owe loyalty to only you.
When you’re looking online, you have multiple options. There are so many firms advertising SNAP defense. Thankfully, your search is over. Spodek Law Group P.C. offers premier white-glove service and we’re unafraid of fighting. Unlike firms that are more focused on their relationship with the agency than with you, we owe loyalty to only YOU. Your store, your family, your license.
One reason our firm has such a high success rate is that we’re selective about who we work with. If we’re choosing to work with you, it’s because we think we can make a positive impact. That’s vastly different from firms that take on any client willing to pay. When you reach out, you start with a risk-free consultation - and you can ask us anything you want, regardless of how long it takes.
If there’s a way to keep your store in the program, we’ll find it. That’s the whole job.
The ladder turns on two words: pattern, and costly.
Your register knows what was in the basket. Prove it.
Ineligible-item cases are won on product data, not on argument. The agency has amounts and dates. You have the itemized record of what was actually sold, and the store rules the clerk was working under.
Start the response todayFour documents decide whether it’s six months or three years.
7 CFR 278.6(e)(3)-(5)
RETAILER DEFENSE
UPDATED 2026
The ineligible-item charge, and why the term is negotiable
Ineligible-item cases arrive the same way trafficking cases do - a charge letter, an attachment of transactions, and ten days - but they carry a very different ceiling. The sanction is a term, not a permanent bar, and the regulation lays out the terms in a ladder: roughly six months where the record shows carelessness or poor supervision, one year for a pattern involving common nonfood items, three years where the items were costly or conspicuous, and escalation on any second or third sanction.
That ladder is the case. Nothing in the letter is final, and the rung you land on is a conclusion drawn from evidence the agency assembled without you. A deli that heated sandwiches for EBT customers isn’t the same as a store selling appliances off the books, and a clerk who rang detergent through on a busy Friday isn’t a practice. Those distinctions are worth months of authorization, and they’re argued with documents.
The most useful document in almost every one of these cases is the itemized sale. FNS works from amounts and dates; your point-of-sale system holds the basket. When the flagged transaction turns out to be forty dollars of groceries and one four-dollar item that should have been split tender, the shape of the charge changes. When the flagged set is thirty transactions out of eleven thousand, the claim of a pattern gets weaker, and with it the claim of intent.
The second document is the system. Stores that configured EBT eligibility in the POS, posted rules at the register, trained clerks and kept the signed sheets are stores that built a program and had it fail occasionally. That’s the definition of carelessness rather than practice, and it’s the argument for the lowest rung. Owners routinely have this material and never file it, because nobody told them the letter was the only chance.
There’s also a money exit that most owners never hear about. Where a disqualification would cause hardship to participating households - the classic case being a neighborhood with no comparable store within a reasonable distance - 7 CFR 278.6(f) allows FNS to impose a civil money penalty instead of the term. That showing is built from geography and shopper facts, not from sympathy, and it has to be made in the response rather than after the terminal goes dark.
If your letter charges ineligible items, don’t treat it as the small version of a trafficking case. Treat it as the one case where the number is genuinely movable - and move it inside the ten days. Call us today and bring the attachment and last month of register data.
When the biggest cases break, we get the call. That same team answers your ten days.
When the networks need a federal file explained in plain English, they call us.
This bench answers its own phone. Put it on your case.
Tell us what happened. Eight fields, two minutes - and a lawyer reads it today.
Read us the first line of the letter. We’ll tell you what day you’re on.
Bring the envelope, the attachment, and your invoices if you have them. If you don’t have them, bring the letter. The consultation is risk-free, it stays between us, and it happens today - ask us anything, regardless of how long it takes.