Audit: Administrative burden caused North Carolina’s neediest parents to miss relief grants
(The Center Square) – The General Assembly should instruct state agencies to use available data to automatically issue relief payments to North Carolinians, state auditors said in a report issued this week.
The report shows North Carolina’s neediest families did not receive $335 grants meant for parents to help cover costs associated with remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The audit report of the Extra Credit Grant Program, which was published Thursday, said many parents did not receive grant payments because of the additional administrative work the North Carolina Department of Revenue (NCDOR) had to complete to issue the payments.
More than $440 million was set aside for the Extra Credit Grant Program from the Coronavirus Relief Fund. The fund was created in May 2020 from federal money provided by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
Gov. Roy Cooper ordered North Carolina K-12 public schools to transition to remote learning at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020.
“This transition created child care difficulties for families. Without in-person schooling, some parents may not have been able to maintain employment or were forced to work less hours in order to care for their children,” auditors wrote. “Further, virtual schooling required computers and internet access, the cost of which may have reduced a family’s resources.”
NCDOR officials initially said more than 1 million North Carolinians automatically qualified for the program, but some parents did not receive automatic payments and had to submit an application.
Taxpayers who lived in North Carolina the entire 2019 calendar year and qualified for the federal child tax credit automatically received the grants, according to the law, which was signed by Cooper on Sept. 4.
Parents who did not file a 2019 state tax return because their gross income was not more than $10,000 if they were single or $20,000 if they were married had to apply for the grant.
The NCDOR had six weeks before the Oct.15 deadline for application submissions to create the application, provide outreach and process the applications, the report showed.
The application was available by Sept. 17. About 9,000 payments were issued to parents who applied by the October deadline. Another 16,000 payments were issued after the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy successfully sued to extend the deadline to Dec. 7.
“If state law prescribed a method to automatically provide payments to eligible low-income families as was used to provide payments to eligible higher-income families, these additional steps would have been unnecessary and the time constraints would have been relieved,” auditors wrote.
Auditors said the state could use available information from public assistance programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to identify eligible low-income families and make automatic payments. The NCDOR agreed with the state auditor’s findings and recommendations.
NCDOR Secretary Ronny Penny said despite the burden of rolling out the application process, the agency was able to send payments to 165,000 parents who did not meet the tax filing requirement in 2020. Penny said more than 140,000 low-income parents filed a state tax return even though they did not meet the income requirement. NCDOR officials said about 1.1 million payments were issued in 2020.
The deadline for parents to apply for the grants was extended in February to May 31. NCDOR officials said since the program was reauthorized, 4,681 additional grants have been approved.
Lawmakers have proposed legislation that would extend the deadline to July 1.
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