This memorandum provides guidance on reporting expenditures of SNAP funds in order to comply with reporting requirements of Office of Management and Budget Circular A-133 and OMB guidance implementing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 .
To address this problem, the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, also known as the 2008 Farm Bill, authorized funds for pilot projects to evaluate health and nutrition promotion in SNAP to determine if incentives provided to SNAP recipients at the point of sale increase the consumption of fruits, vegetables, or other healthful foods. On the basis of this legislative authority, USDA designed the Healthy Incentive Pilot (HIP).
This study identifies how spending patterns, such as the rate at which households spend their benefit, changed following the ARRA benefit increase and analyzes how spending patterns differed across household characteristics, time and states.