This may be news to some retailers that did not have problems with the Iowa EBT system this month, but for many retailers, it has been a maddening process as the Iowa EBT system that processes the SNAP (formerly food stamp) benefits was updated early this month, with some resulting problems. The Good News: It appears now the problems have been resolved with a lot of hard work and persistence by several IGIA members.
Iowa EBT started a new contract with its EBT processor – Affiliated Coupon Services – early this month and, with the new contract, a new system was switched over to. ACS, which processes EBT SNAP (and other) benefits in many other states, has programming that offers many features, of which some states choose some features, some choose others, etc.
The State of Iowa is no different and chose features it felt fit the needs it had. One of the features available the State of Iowa chose not to go with was a program called “auto card replace.” The “auto card replace” program is set up to automatically replace cards that have been manually entered a certain number of times.
Unfortunately, ACS did not turn off the “auto card replace” program for Iowa and, when the new system was implemented in early July, cards that EBT SNAP recipients used that were manually entered because of defective magnetic stripes or other issues, were not authorizing payments to retailers. The result was cards were being declined, SNAP recipients could not purchase food and stores could not do anything about it except try and explain to customers who needed food that the system was not working. Almost nothing is worse than hungry customers who cannot buy food they thought they could.
As more and more stores reported problems, the Iowa Department of Human Services staff recognized the problem and got ACS to turn off the “auto card replace” feature. For the most part, this fixed the problem.
But, that wasn’t all. It was soon discovered that outages were occurring daily – often at the busiest times of day for retailers. The problem was traced to a “bug” in the software used by ACS (Siebel software), which was fixed by re-installing corrected software. Soon, many stores reported other issues pertaining to not getting balances back for customers and clearing transactions. I received several calls from stores, and pretty soon the common denominator seemed to be all the stores experiencing problems were using RBS World Pay for processing.
Since RBS World Pay is not a member of the IGIA, I did not have a “good contact” to call directly. I encouraged some of IGIA’s larger members to call RBS and get to the bottom of the problem. As I have found in a dozen years of leading the IGIA, if you get a large customer calling a supplier of goods about a problem, they can get a much faster reply and suddenly have an interest in “working with the IGIA to fix the problem!”
After several phone calls (and finally getting all parties to talk to each other), the problem was discovered through a process of elimination. A BIN number set up in RBS World Pay’s software for EBT only cards was being routed to SHAZAM by mistake, instead of to ACS – the State of Iowa’s processor. Once identified, it did not take long for the problem to get fixed, and it appears no major issues have arisen since then.
Well, actually there is one issue out there. For a long time, retailers have complained that the card quality of EBT SNAP recipients have been a problem. The “auto card replace” issue showed that there are approximately 23,000 cards out in the state that need to be replaced because they were being used frequently manually. The Iowa Department of Human Services recognizes this is a problem – not only recipients but stores that have to manually key in cards. It slows down transactions, costs more and makes SNAP recipients uncomfortable, like they are being “singled out” for using an EBT SNAP card (and this reason was one of the main selling points for going to EBT in the first place!).
The Iowa DHS is looking at sending a letter to those 23,000 defective card holders, asking them to call in on a toll free number for replacement cards. I believe you will see the Iowa DHS put a greater emphasis on this now that it knows how big of a problem it is.
Lastly, I need to give kudos to Iowa Department of Human Services Program Manager Tracy Penick, who just took over in the role for the recently retired Jan Walter (who left some big shoes to fill!). Tracy has bent over backwards to keep the IGIA informed, so it can relay things to its membership. Tracy answers her cell phone on nights and weekends (I personally can vouch for that!) and will call members back.
IGIA retail members the association has e-mail addresses for received a special Alert on Friday, July 16, about issues with EBT. In fact, the Iowa DHS and IGIA had plans to keep IGIA members in the know over last weekend, when it appeared there might be more problems with EBT.
If you have an e-mail address and are an IGIA member (in particular a retailer), you got timely information. If you have not given us your e-mail address (used only for IGIA purposed and never given out to others), you did not know what was going on. Help yourself out by sending your e-mail address to Cara Corkrean in the IGIA office at ccorkrean@iowagrocers.com as soon as possible.
And, if you are not an IGIA member, and are reading this – what are you waiting for? Better call the IGIA office right now at 800-383-3663 and join today. Don’t be “in the dark” the next time an emergency pops up or help is needed with regulatory agencies! We can help!
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