The official U.S. poverty measure has been in place since the 1960’s. In 1995, The National Academy of Sciences Report suggested improving this measure. In 2010, an Interagency Technical Working Group provided a guideline for a Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that the U.S. Census Bureau, with the help of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, will develop. The SPM will not replace the official poverty measure but will provide a more intricate measure of poverty.

One aspect of the SPM is that it considers federal government in-kind benefits as near-money because they are designed to reduce poverty. The SPM will include nutritional assistance, subsidized housing, and home energy assistance as family resources. Estimates of these programs will come from the Current Population Survey (CPS). Previous research has shown that benefit receipts of these programs are often underreported.

This paper examines the misreporting of nutritional assistance on the CPS received by Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. In addition, the paper assesses the difference between the SNAP self-reported amount and the administrative amount in relation to the official poverty measure. This research is conducted using probabilistic record linkage techniques on 2005 Texas, Illinois, and Maryland SNAP administrative data and the CPS 2006 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC).