Xerox "Routine Backup Test" Leave 17 States Without Food Stamps

An anonymous reader writes "People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure. Xerox announced late in the evening that access has been restored for users in the 17 states affected by the outage, hours after the first problems were reported. 'Restarting the EBT system required time to ensure service was back at full functionality,' spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer said in an email. An emergency voucher process was available in some of the areas while the problems were occurring, she said. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe underscored that the outage was not related to the government shutdown."

Comments

This is exactly why testing backups is necessary

[dwhitaker]

Backups don't always work - that's why you test them. This time they did not work - much better that you experience problems when you anticipate them than when everything else is going wrong, too. It's unfortunate that the system was down, but it seems they got it back up in a reasonably quick time frame. Moreover, merchants are supposed to have manual means of recording EBT payments for just such a scenario.

Fail-safe

[girlintraining]

People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday,

Why is it that a convenience -- our credit cards, are able to weather a failure like this by simply allowing all purchases, but our food stamp cards simply stop working? Credit card systems are, at every level, designed to cope with a failure by simply authorizing the purchase. Only a very small number of transactions would have been failed anyway for insufficient funds, etc., and these are reconciled when that part of the system is restored to service... meaning there's very little loss to the provider for this.

For that matter, if they've decided to design the system in this fashion, where were the redundancies? If a routine backup can result in failure on this scale, then it begs the question of where and how the backup of the actual systems, not just the data, got overlooked.

Re:Fail-safe

[girlintraining]

One of the news articles mentioned that merchants were supposed to record transactions manually and allow purchases up to $50

Due to the government shutdown, I cannot provide primary source data such as would be normally available from the USDA, etc. In lieu of that, the links provided represent the best non-authoritative sources available at this time.

The average household size is 2.48. Source.
The average person spends about $70 a week on food Source
76% of people on food stamps are disabled, elderly, or children. Source
Around 44 million Americans are on food stamps now*

* [Couldn't find credible source; Estimated from multiple sources]

This would mean that the average weekly trip to the grocery store, for an average household, would be $173.60. If your number is correct, then the government has opted to allow vendors to 28% of a family's food to be processed. Also according to the article, this outage may last up to three days.

Now here's the thing; A lot of those families live 'paycheck to paycheck'. Even if it is welfare; They don't have a fully stocked pantry. If they don't buy food today, a lot of them don't eat. And most people go shopping on the weekend. Your quoted $50 means the average family runs out of food in just under two days. I was unable to find any citation to back your assertion that they were allowing purchases as long as they were under $50 as well, so I have my doubts as to its validity. Anecdotally, two of my friends who have food stamps in the midwestern area reported being unable to purchase any food or remove any amount of cash benefits from their accounts.

So either the situation is 'rather bad' -- 1 in 8 Americans will be going hungry for at least one day this week on average. Or it's 'very bad', in that 1 in 8 Americans will be going hungry for three days. And possibly longer -- many of those people use public transportation or arranged rides to get to the grocery store every week. Especially the elderly and disabled. These rides are picked out weeks ahead of time. For them, they could be looking at not eating for a week or more.

So I return to my original point: Why is it that credit card companies, who offer a convenience, do this, but our government, which provides something that in a very literal sense is life or death to some people, does not? There is no answer to that question that I come away with that makes this look like anything other than criminal neglect of a vulnerable population.

Senator Obama on raising the debt ceiling

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me remind you all of Senator Obama's words from 2006 regarding the raising of the debt ceiling. He voted against raising the debt ceiling at that time.

"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government can not pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally."

Source

How true are those words? I only wish President Obama still believed what he did as Senator.

Re:GET A JOB YA BUMS

[roc97007]

There Are 3 Unemployed People Competing For Every Job Opening

But is this a measure of people competing for jobs in good faith, or is it merely the number of people unemployed divided by the number of jobs? From TFA, I see it's the latter.

This doesn't take into account people like, for instance, my sister, who hasn't worked since the mid-nineties and is grimly determined to do whatever it takes to remain on government assistance for the remainder of her life. Justified by "I had bad things happen to me in my youth; society owes me a comfortable living in the manner and place of my choosing as a result."

I'm pretty sure she's not the only one.

Yes, it does

[rsilvergun]

you increase the top earner's rates on income over a certain amount. In the 50s and 60s we had the highest growth in real wages and middle class incomes the country (maybe even the species) has ever seen with a 90% top tax bracket. How? Because that 90% wasn't a flat "Give us 90% of your income" it was "90 % over 1 Million" or about $9 million in todays money. So if you made over $9 million dollars in a SINGLE YEAR then you paid 90% of that to the gov't. This kept wealth inequality in check and forced top earners to really work for that money over $9 million. If you wanted to be filthy, stinking rich you really had to work at it (people still did). Meanwhile gov't programs redistributed the wealth. Maybe not evenly, but it's better than phoney job creators hording it and holding up human progress by sitting on their fat rears with all the money in the world...

Re:Yes, it does

[dbraden]

I have never understood how anyone could morally justify confiscating 90% of someone else's income for income over a certain amount. I don't care if your intentions are altruistic or not, you simply don't have the right to make that choice for me. If you want to spend that money, go earn it yourself and spend it however you want, and I'll do the same.