SALT LAKE CITY — The state's effort to carve out supposed welfare and unemployment benefits cheaters might be cheating low-income families with citizen rights out of government emergency benefits.
That was the upshot of a lengthy discussion in a Wednesday interim committee meeting in which the director of the state department overseeing unemployment and food stamp programs was grilled about recent changes in enrollment requirements, income status and other benefits qualifications.
The best that the state Department of Workforce Services administrators could do during the sometimes chilly dialogue with members of its governing interim committee was to assure lawmakers they are doing their best under the circumstances.
With the economy still in a lull, unemployment still high and state revenues dictating smaller staffing proportions to deal with ever-increasing demand, the agency is doing all it can, Kristen Cox, DWS executive director, told members of the Workforce Services and Community and Economic Development Interim Committee.
Compounding the difficulties, and a factor initiating the discussion, was the controversy over the distribution last month of a list of 1,300 purported illegal immigrants in Utah. Low-income advocates had asked program administrators to respond publicly to what they considered a breach of federal privacy laws.
In July, a list of alleged illegal immigrants in Utah was sent anonymously to police and local news media outlets demanding that those on the list be deported. Workforce Services has said that private information came from its department databases and that two employees have been identified as being responsible for compiling and distributing the list.
Cox said that the new income disclosure qualifications and other enrollment requirements were already in the works and are coincidental with the list controversy, not a result of it.
At least two interim committee members said the department had been lax in keeping lawmakers informed about changes in benefits requirements, despite holding public hearings on what it knew would be controversial changes that have led to widespread misinformation about who is receiving benefits.
"We are just strapped, and we do want to be responsive," Cox told the committee, noting that the department's frontline staff has been bearing the brunt of what was already the highest-demand period in the department's history.
Not keeping lawmakers better informed at the time controversy over immigrant status in the state is peaking is the opposite of helping legislators know exactly where laws might be changed or where they might intervene, said Sen. Luz Robles, D-Salt Lake and former minority citizens group advocate.
"I don't know what the history has been, but as this discussion moves forward, if we're going to know the process (for making qualification changes), we need to have a heads-up on how it will impact families," Robles said.
For example, in homes where there are two citizen children — what some refer to as "anchor children" born to undocumented parents, but American citizens by virtue of being born here — those children are being denied the $60 per month benefit because of the immigration status of the parents, according to new qualification guidelines.
Rep. Steve Mascaro, R-West Jordan, said difficulty in establishing someone's income should not be regarded as an immigration issue. However, he said, it should be viewed as a problem in many sectors of the economy, including construction, where he worked for 30 years and which has a well-known and rampant pattern of paying people on an undisclosed, cash-for-job basis among all demographic groups, not just illegal immigrants.
e-mail: jthalman@desnews.com