Nationwide SNAP Violation Lawyers

Memphis Snap Violation Attorneys

Since the mid-1960s, the SNAP program has been America’s flagship vehicle for preventing widespread, severe malnourished due to poverty. First established in its modern form under the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the SNAP program has come to represent one of the major progressive victories of the last 100 years in the United States. The program is widely regarded as being one of the most successful anti-poverty measures ever undertaken by a government and has served as a world-wide model of how to eradicate the worst consequences of poverty.

But in its early years, the program was beset by high levels of waste and fraud. This led to the creation of a special enforcement arm within the U.S Department of Agriculture, the government agency responsible for overseeing SNAP. Known as the Food and Nutrition Services, the special enforcement office has over 100 full-time investigators, whose sole job is to find cases of fraud taking place throughout the SNAP system.

Overall, the anti-fraud efforts have been a huge success. It has been estimated that in the first decade of the SNAP program’s existence, up to ten percent of all money expended in benefits was being consumed by fraud and abuse. Today, that figure has been reduced to just one percent of all money spent by the program being diverted into fraudulent activity.

But these enforcement victories have also brought about some unwanted collateral damage. One of the more serious consequences to these vigorous enforcement efforts have been an increasing number of SNAP-eligible store owners being caught up in the dragnet of the FNS and its agents. Each year, an estimated 15,000 businesses are investigated for potential fraud related to the SNAP program. The vast majority of these companies are small, family owned convenience stores in urban areas. Up to 5,000 business owners each year are subjected to some form of penalty, including fines and exclusion from the SNAP program. In as many as 500 cases each year, the owners of the stores where alleged SNAP program violations occurred are sentenced to jail or prison terms.

If you become the target of a USDA investigation, you need to hire a lawyer

SNAP violation present a unique and challenging area of the law, which requires that lawyers practicing in this area have extensive expertise. Ideally, any lawyer handling a SNAP fraud case should be someone who specializes in that area of jurisprudence.

But if you are a store owner yourself, the single most important thing to know, should you receive a letter from the USDA detailing allegations of SNAP program abuses or fraud, is that you need to call an experienced and competent lawyer as soon as possible. Once you receive a letter from the USDA, you will have just ten days to respond to the allegations. Unlike in other areas of the law, the burden of proof is on you to show that you are innocent of the charges. Because the initial phases of a SNAP violation case involve mostly administrative actions, there is no burden on the state to prove that you are actually guilty of any of the alleged violations. In fact, there are many cases that we’ve seen where the target of the investigation clearly did nothing wrong, but for one reason or another, the agent in charge of the case decided to go ahead and fine or exclude the client from the program anyway.

However, even the most zealous USDA agent will usually not want to be forced to deal with a lawyer experienced in SNAP fraud cases. The truth is that almost all SNAP fraud investigations can be negotiated down to the store owner simply paying and small fine and going on their way. Even if you feel that you did nothing wrong, this can be a far better alternative than attempting to fight the USDA on your own, a move that often gets store owners temporarily excluded from the program. Our lawyers have decades of experience in handling these cases. And they can almost always avoid having a temporary exclusion from the SNAP program imposed on our clients’ businesses, an event that can often prove fatal to vulnerable, small convenience stores.

If you have come under USDA scrutiny for alleged SNAP violations, give us a call today. A good lawyer can make all the difference.