The second Access, Participation, Eligibility and Certification Study (APEC II) included a follow-on report that provided statistically-derived state-level estimates of school meals erroneous payments. However, while APEC II provided a rough indicator of relative risk for groups of states (e.g., higher than average, about average, lower than average), it was not a state-representative direct measure, and creating actual annual measures of such erroneous payments at the state level using APEC methodology is cost-prohibitive. This report explores alternative approaches to developing measurement-based state-specific estimates that are responsive to year-to-year changes in the actual underlying rate in each state. It also provides cost and burden estimates for the implementation of each of these methods.

This report assesses that pilot and includes a qualitative evaluation of the vendor and ITO experiences and an assessment of pilot costs.

In 2007, USDA introduced a new set of food packages via an Interim Rule based on recommendations from the Institute of Medicine, which were implemented by October 2009. The contents of the food packages were finalized via a Final Rule in 2014. The Final Rule clarified some provisions in the Interim Rule and allowed some additional options and substitutions.

FNS developed the Access, Participation, Eligibility and Certification (APEC) study series, which collects and analyzes data from a nationally representative sample of schools and school food authorities (SFAs) about every 5 years. APEC allows FNS to develop a national estimate of erroneous payment rates and amounts in three key areas: certification error, meal claiming error and aggregation error.  FNS recently completed APEC II, which collected data in School Year 2012-2013 and this report summarizes those findings.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act directed USDA to study the extent to which school food authorities  participating in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs pay indirect costs to local education agencies. It specifically requested an assessment of the methodologies used to establish indirect costs, the types and amounts of indirect costs that are charged and not charged to the school foodservice account, and the types and amounts of indirect costs recovered by LEAs.

This study examines the cost of producing National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program meals during school year 2005-06. It measures both reported costs – costs charged directly to school food service accounts – and unreported costs – those costs paid by school districts in support of school food authority operations – to estimate the full cost of meal production.

The study examined the costs charged to SFAs (reported costs), as well as those costs incurred by the school district in support of SFA operations, but not charged to the SFA (unreported costs). Together, the reported costs and the unreported costs are the full cost of meal production.

The study collected data on-site on food, labor, and other meal production costs for a five day period. A major goal was to test the feasibility of identifying meal production costs that were not charged to the SFA account (to obtain full costs) and directly allocating costs to different SFA activities.

The primary objective of this study was to determine the savings in Medicaid costs for newborns and their mothers during the first 60 days after birth resulting from participating the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) during pregnancy.