Missouri sued over long wait times at ‘nonfunctional’ call center for food benefits

Mary Holmes has called the state of Missouri 11 times in the past two months.

Holmes is 55, a cancer and COPD patient who lives on disability payments. She needed to renew her $243 in monthly food assistance benefits with the Missouri Department of Social Services (DSS). After three unsuccessful tries over the phone, she paid a relative to drive her to a DSS service center, where she filled out an application.

Then she was told a required interview would be conducted over the phone.

The agency called two days later and placed her on hold. She was number 692 in line, and didn’t get through after four hours.

The same thing happened in seven more calls.

“It was real stressful,” she said in an interview. “When they get almost to you, they have an answering thing come on saying, that’s all the calls they’re taking for the day, ‘Call back tomorrow.’ But you have to start all over again.”

Holmes never was able to complete an interview, and this month was denied the SNAP benefits. She’s been relying on a food pantry, and family and friends, to survive. She’s also out about $70 in phone minutes for the hours she spent on hold.

Her ordeal is detailed in a new federal lawsuit Holmes filed against the state Tuesday. It alleges that DSS is wrongly denying thousands of low-income residents food stamps because the its call center is so backlogged it is preventing the agency from completing the application process.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri by Holmes and another applicant for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) along with advocacy group Empower Missouri.

Missouri faces increased scrutiny from lawmakers and advocates in recent months over backlogs in its social safety net.

Worker turnover rates are near 40% in the Department of Social Services (DSS) division that evaluates applicants’ eligibility for social services, acting director Robert Knodell has said. In the recently expanded Medicaid system, more than 70,000 applications are pending and processing times have reached 70 days, far exceeding a federal limit of 45.

Workers have been shifted around between the call centers and processing Medicaid applications during the crunch, Family Support Division director Kim Evans told lawmakers last week.

The plaintiffs in Tuesday’s lawsuit say the understaffed DSS call center for SNAP applicants is so dysfunctional that many can’t complete the interview in the required 30 days, causing them to be denied or lose existing benefits even if they meet the income qualifications. In December, the complaint states, more than a quarter of calls to the SNAP interview line were dropped by DSS because the call center was over capacity--and three quarters were abandoned.

Food assistance benefits are funded by the federal government, and under federal law any applicant that qualifies must receive the benefits.

Failure to complete an interview accounted for more than half of the state’s denials of SNAP benefits in September, October and December last year, the lawsuit states, totaling tens of thousands of applications.

Advocates said they believe these denials explain why food stamps recipients declined in Missouri last summer despite the state’s cutoff of federal pandemic unemployment aid.

“People are not even getting to the door,” said Katherine Holley of the Legal Services of Eastern Missouri and one of Holmes’ attorneys. “They’re not even being evaluated for eligibility. They can’t get through to talk to anyone.”

Compounding the problem, the complaint states, are limited hours at DSS service centers, where Holley said the state denies in-person interviews. That forces almost all applicants to use the call center, where the average wait times were more than two-and-a-half hours in November and December.

The complaint describes instances of applicants’ calls being dropped after being on hold so long they exceeded their phone service providers’ time limits. Applicants can also receive a call from DSS to be interviewed, but that call leads right back to the call center wait list, the complaint states.

“The call center is so overwhelmed as to be almost completely nonfunctional,” the attorneys wrote.

Knodell declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. He and other officials have acknowledged increased wait times amid staff shortages in legislative hearings.

But advocates said the pandemic has only exacerbated problems that have existed for years.

“I just think that’s an unsatisfactory explanation as to why this is so dysfunctional and for so long,” Holley said.

Attorneys from the National Center for Law and Economic Justice in New York joined the lawsuit. Katharine Deabler-Meadows, an attorney from that organization, said the state’s reliance on the call center unfairly prevents people with disabilities from having other options to apply for SNAP.

She said advocates have seen a national trend of state social service departments reducing in-person services in favor of online applications and call centers, which she said hurts low-income residents who don’t have reliable phone or Internet service.

“We’re talking about people who frequently do not have reliable Internet access, or their only access to a phone might be a pay-per-minute phone, and having to sit on hold for hours is not an option for them,” Deabler-Meadows said. “It’s part of a concerning national trend, although I would say the facts on the ground in Missouri are some of the most dramatic I’ve ever seen.”

In a budget hearing last week, Knodell said the state believes clients have preferred to use online or mobile platforms to communicate with DSS rather than visit service centers in person during the pandemic.

“How they’ve interacted with us have changed,” he said. “We all know state technology often lags ... It’s our responsibility as a department to be interactive and to be responsive to that.”