Colorado's Food Assistance Failures

Due to faulty technology, Colorado has higher food assistance processing times than many other states, ranking in the bottom five states in the country. These increased processing times, and sometimes full-on delays due to outdated and dysfunctional technology, mean that some months, some families do not receive the assistance they need to buy food.

The eleven largest counties in the state miss out on helping 850 families every thirty minutes, but the technology is not functioning. Between April and December, the technology was down for a total of 73 hours, failing 124,000 Colorado families. This technology has been considered dysfunctional for years, but Colorado focused on little fixes on a vendor-by-vendor basis instead of fixing the system. Improvements are slowly being made to Colorado's problematic processing; they've been placed under a federal corrective action plan and have improved their statewide processing average to 88% of new applications being processed on time. Read more here.