The date listed on the receipt is June 22, 2016, and in trying to find the original source, what I have found so far is a website called Red State Watcher published the images on June 30, followed up by America's Freedom Fighters and Conservative Tribune on July 1, 2016.
Full receipt showing the store address and phone number below:
IT GETS WORSE - FEDS/STATES HAVE AN ONGOING AUDITING PROBLEM
While researching we found that over the few years, this type of issue has come up more than once, with a 2013 report from WPXI.com as a result of a Target 11 investigation into another receipt found and verified with a $12,000 food stamp balance.
Earle then showed the receipt to the secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, the office that administers the food stamp program. Earle asked the secretary if the high balance is a concern. "Yes it is. I don't understand why that is," said Beverly Mackereth, the secretary, who requested a copy of the receipt and vowed to investigate further. "This is something that we should show the feds. Perhaps they don't even realize this is happening. We will check it out," she told Earle.
According to a DPW spokesperson, under federal law they can't shut down an account unless it's been inactive for 12 months. And the spokesperson said while high balances are unusual they are not illegal. They told Earle they've seen cases where a person is suffering from a mental illness and just doesn't use the benefit, or a person grows their own food and stockpiles the benefits. The food stamp benefits roll over at the end of the month.
"For government to allow that type of a balance to occur, I mean there ought to be audits of every one of these accounts," said state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, Cranberry (R), who argued that a person with that high balance doesn't really need assistance every month.
Target 11 discovered nearly two million people in Pennsylvania are on food stamps. It costs taxpayers $231 million every month.
"I think for taxpayers who are working hard every day to make a living to make ends meet for them to see a receipt like this would create outrage and rightly so," said Metcalfe.
In Washington state KIRO 7 reported that a cashier of a store secretly started saving some receipts showing some had balances of $1,464 on their food card, with another young woman with a child showing an balance of $8,427.
In 2013 it was reported that, Boston, Massachusetts was forced to take action to prevent this type of issue.
Welfare recipients who accumulate high balances on their electronic benefit transfer cards will have those cards shut down under new state rules.
Cash assistance recipients with balances above $1,500 will be notified to see if they still need assistance, and EBT cards with balances exceeding $2,500 will be closed, Stacey Monahan, commissioner of the Department of Transitional Assistance, announced Wednesday. The move, she said, would ensure that only clients who truly need benefits receive them.
The DTA will also begin contacting recipients of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program with balances greater than $5,000 to ensure they still need the benefits.
In October 2015, Channel 10 investigated extremely high balances accrued on EBT/Food Stame cards and found "41 households with SNAP balances between $7,000 and $10,000. An additional 14 households have SNAP balances of $10,000 to $21,000."
The chart they produced, shown below:
April 2016, the Albuquerque Journal reported that "2,100 accounts had balances of more than $1,000......... The largest balance in food stamp benefits was nearly $9,500 for an account in Santa Fe County, and the second largest was more than $8,000 for a case in Lea County, the data show. Another 238 accounts had balances between $2,500 and $8,000."
There is an ongoing, nationwide problem of extremely high balances on EBT food stamp cards. The point here is if these households do not "need" the funds the state or federal goverments are providing, then why are they receiving those funds to begin with?
ABUSING THE WELFARE SYSTEM -EBT FUNDS USED AT STRIP CLUBS, FOR LOBSTER AND STEAKS AND MORE
WELFARE QUEENS, ABUSING THE SYSTEM AND PROUD OF IT
WELFARE PAYS BETTER THAN ENTRY LEVEL JOBS IN SOME STATES
In 2013, I reported at Wake up America, about a Fox News special report where they followed "29-year-old is Jason Greenslate from La Jolla, CA, who has lived off of government assistance, including food stamps, for years. Jason is a California beach bum that drives a new Escalade and eats lobster and sushi, all paid for by American taxpayers."
BOTTOM LINE
The welfare system is out of control, money being handed to people who are accruing it rather than using it, indicating they do not "need" it to begin with, and a lack of oversight is allowing this problem to get worse. Then we have the massive fraud consistently uncovered over the years, the welfare queens that think they shouldn't have to work since they can receive "free money" from the government which the government is taking from taxpayers to support them.
When EBT balances accrued are more than the majority of American workers have in their bank accounts.... there is a serious problem.
