Massachusetts racked up $364 million in SNAP payment errors in Fiscal Year 2024, and Gov. Maura Healey says COVID is the reason. A pandemic that officially ended years ago.

Healey addressed the figures after a USDA letter, dated Feb. 8, 2024, urged the state to bring its Department of Transitional Assistance into compliance with basic federal standards. The letter, sent under the Biden administration, read:

"I urge you to prioritize these concerns and take appropriate steps to make sure that your State has an acceptable application processing timeliness rate, payment error rate, and case and procedural error rate and meets basic Federal requirements."

That was Biden's own USDA saying Massachusetts wasn't meeting the floor. Not a MAGA audit. Not a political hit job. The sitting Democratic administration looked at Massachusetts and told its Democratic governor to do better.

The Numbers Tell a Different Story Than COVID

Healey's COVID explanation has a math problem. In FY22, the state's SNAP payment error rate sat at 11.7%. During her first year as governor, that rate dipped slightly to 9.86% in FY23, the Boston Herald reported. Progress, however modest. Then in FY24, it skyrocketed to 14.1%.

That means the error rate got worse under Healey's watch, not better, and it got worse as the country moved further from the pandemic, not closer to it. Of the $364 million in erroneous payments, $338 million were overpayments. Only six states in the country posted higher error rates than Massachusetts that year.

Massachusetts received more than $2.6 billion in federal SNAP funding in FY24, flowing in at a rate exceeding $240 million per month. When 14.1 cents of every dollar go to the wrong place, that is not a rounding error. That is a systemic failure.

Yet Healey leaned hard into the pandemic explanation. She told reporters:

"I think there's just some hangover from COVID, and that's why you continue to see payment error rates around the country. The important thing to me is that that is going down in Massachusetts, and we're going to continue to do everything that we need to do."

Going down? The rate nearly doubled from FY23 to FY24. Complete data from FY25 is not yet available, so Healey is asking the public to trust her projections while the actual numbers move in the wrong direction.

The Whistleblower Account

A mid-level DTA staffer, described as an agency insider, offered a very different picture of what happened inside the department. The whistleblower described a culture where verification took a back seat to volume.

"When you've got this kind of volume and get directives from higher-ups to just keep surging ahead and to not ask too many invasive questions, it becomes overwhelming for a single DTA employee to try to counter."

This is not a description of pandemic-era emergency protocols lingering a little too long. It is a description of institutional pressure to move cases through the pipeline regardless of accuracy. The whistleblower went further, calling for the state to cooperate with federal oversight:

"I might have thought differently a few years ago, but at this point, there's so much fraud and messiness and innocent people being victimized by this theft that the state needs to turn over the information."

"Innocent people being victimized by this theft." That is not a Republican operative talking. That is someone inside the agency describing what they see every day.

The Pandemic Defense Has an Expiration Date

DTA spokesperson Cecille Avila backed up the governor's framing, telling the Herald that payment error rates increased nationwide "because of federal policy changes" during COVID-19. A separate DTA statement called the agency's pandemic-era approach "intentional and appropriate," arguing it "prevented hunger and stabilized families during an emergency."

There is a grain of truth here. During the pandemic, the federal government directed states to prioritize rapid access to benefits and implement broad waivers that reduced verification processes. Every state dealt with that transition. But FY24 is not the pandemic. The emergency waivers are gone. The question is what happened after.

What happened in Massachusetts is that error rates climbed to their highest point in the available data. State and federal authorities have uncovered several public benefits fraud schemes in Massachusetts totaling tens of millions of dollars. The problem is not theoretical. It is documented, investigated, and ongoing.

Healey herself acknowledged the seriousness of fraud in the abstract:

"As somebody who prosecuted fraud and abuse as a career prior to this, we take very seriously, and I do, program integrity. We want to make sure that we're getting the very best out of every single federal taxpayer dollar in this instance."

That rhetoric collides with two stubborn facts:

• The error rate worsened dramatically on her watch.
• She refuses to hand over SNAP recipient information, including immigration status, to the Trump administration and USDA.

You cannot simultaneously claim to take program integrity "very seriously" and refuse to cooperate with federal efforts to verify who is receiving federal benefits. Those positions are mutually exclusive.

Distraction or Accountability?

President Trump identified Massachusetts as among the most fraud-ridden states during the State of the Union address. Healey's response last week was to call the allegations a "distraction."

A $364 million discrepancy. A 14.1% error rate. Tens of millions in documented fraud schemes. A whistleblower described a culture of "don't ask too many invasive questions." A Biden-era USDA letter saying the state failed to meet basic federal requirements.

That is a lot of material for a distraction.

Healey says she took "immediate action" by hiring more caseworkers, tightening eligibility verification, and investing in training. Those steps may eventually show results. But the timeline matters. The USDA flagged problems going back to FY22 under the Baker administration. Healey improved the number slightly in FY23. Then it blew past the original problem in FY24. Whatever corrective measures she implemented, they did not work when it counted.

COVID gave governors enormous latitude to expand programs and loosen controls. That era is over. The governors who used the pandemic as cover for building systems that couldn't verify their own accuracy are now being asked to account for the results. Some are cooperating. Massachusetts is not.

Three hundred and sixty-four million dollars went to the wrong place. The people who needed those benefits correctly are the ones who pay the price when a system loses the ability to tell the difference between a legitimate recipient and a fraudulent claim. Calling that a distraction does not make it one.