WELFARE FINGERPRINTING CALLED INEFFECTIVE AND HUMILIATING

Fingerprinting anyone who applies for welfare will cost Missouri more than $5 million and save it far less, an advocate for welfare recipients said at a meeting Thursday evening.

Jeanette Mott Oxford of St. Louis, executive director of Reform Organization of Welfare or ROWEL, told a meeting of the Cape Girardeau chapter that under bills proposed in both chambers of the Missouri General Assembly backed by the Missouri Department of Social Services, all applicants and recipients of welfare would have to undergo a high-tech version of fingerprinting called electronic finger imaging.

The state would use that method to make sure recipients weren't drawing benefits in other states and under more than one name in one state, and for enforcing the nationwide limit of five years for drawing welfare benefits. It would cost $5.5 million to implement in the first year and $600,000 a year afterward.

Other states have tried this method with poor results, Oxford said. "Connecticut spent $5.1 million to catch six cases of fraud, most of which would be found by other methods," she said.

Currently anyone applying for welfare must furnish birth certificates for everyone in the household, picture identification cards, bank records, rent receipts and other bills.

The Missouri Division of Family Services already has computer links with bordering states and the Division of Employment Security to make sure that no one who is collecting benefits is doing so in neighboring states or working, Oxford said.

"If I wanted to spend a bunch of money to go and get a bunch of false IDs to defraud the government, and in the end I'd get about $6,000 a year in welfare and food stamps, it just wouldn't be worth it," Oxford said.

Oxford said that she met with state officials who could not furnish her with any statistics about how many cases of fraud they might catch through fingerprinting.

In addition, fingerprinting is humiliating to the applicant, said Nancy Birk, a ROWEL member from Cape Girardeau. "I've gone through that to get a job," she said.

Oxford said the fingerprinting procedure could deter people who deserve benefits from applying. She said that Congress took a fingerprinting requirement out of the Brady Law for registering handguns. "They don't want to fingerprint people who apply for guns," she said. "But if you go to ask for help, they're going to fingerprint you."

Hearings on both bills have been postponed, Oxford said.