After looking at this claim alone, it can be seen that it is definitely exaggerated or misleading. After reading through the source that's posted above, there's indeed quite a bit of evidence that points towards how each state is the one that may end up making the error of incorrectly calculating a household's expenses, or even just forgetting to update a client's amount of income due to not having that information on hand right away (USDA, 2025). The person who reviewed this claim is on the right track with noting how there's less fraud and more over/underpayments within the SNAP system -- the U.S. Government Accountability Office (or GAO for short) goes into more detail about this on https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107461. As both the user above and GAO mentions, the USDA has indeed estimated that about 11.7% (or rather, $10.5 billion) in SNAP benefits have been improperly made within the fiscal year 2023, but not by the people who fraudulently get SNAP benefits on their end. Instead, USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), which oversees SNAP, has determined that SNAP has inaccurately estimated proper payment rates, and thus, have become a government-wide issue due to the mishandling of government funds (GAO, 2024). Not only that, but the USDA also mentions on https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/usda-efforts-reduce-waste-fraud-and-abuse-supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap about how the FNS is actively helping to combat abuse and misuse of SNAP benefits, stating that over the last 15 years they've implemented a number of measures in order to help reduce the trafficking of SNAP down from 4% to just 1%. In 2010, 42 FNS investigators alone had conducted nearly 5,000 undercover investigations to ensure that this would not continue to be a problem (USDA, 2025). This information alone shows that the misuse of SNAP benefits does not solely rest on clients' shoulders, but is instead primarily caused within SNAP's system which then causes a sort of snowball effect that just continues to spiral over time. In short, the website https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10860 states that "SNAP fraud is rare, according to available data and reports, but there['s] no single data point [that] can [reflect] all the forms of fraud in SNAP" (Congress, 2025). In addition to this, Randy Alison Aussenberg, the author for this particular article, goes into depth about the different types of error and fraud there are. One is the National Payment Error Rate (NPER), which talks about both the overpay and underpay rate and how neither are a measure of fraud but instead are something that has exceeded the error tolerance threshold (aka inflation that's adjusted annually per statue) (Congress, 2025). Something to take into account when looking at this information is that due to SNAP being one of the government's largest nutritional welfare program, not everything is verified in a timely manner -- yet, the government actually has little say in how SNAP does its work. With this in mind, there may be ways for the government to be able to help ensure this very problem stops happening, with one way being developing and calculating the return on investment (ROI) and thus, funding specific program integrity activities. This may be just one of many ways to help ensure that errors happen less, and overall, helps show that people who receive SNAP are not the ones to blame for any errors/"abuse" that occur. Again, the user who posted the claim above does well to note how the original claim that was made is false and in need of some important context in this matter, which really seems to be the case here -- or rather, is exceptionally exaggerated/misleading in addition to being false in general.
Sources used:
https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/usda-efforts-reduce-waste-fraud-and-abuse-supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107461
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10860
https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-spotlights/reducing-waste-and-fraud-snap
