Verifying income for public benefits is about to get easier in Missouri
The Missouri Department of Social Services on Wednesday announced it will soon adopt a new service that makes it a bit less cumbersome to apply for benefits.
The service, SteadyIQ, streamlines the process of income verification, a once straightforward process that officials said has been complicated by the rise of gig work and other forms of nontraditional income.
The new service, related to a gig-work app called Steady that was cofounded by former investment banker Adam Roseman and basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, simplifies the process of applying to benefits like Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. With the user’s permission, the service connects to payroll providers and payment services, like PayPal or Venmo, obviating the need to send agencies bundles of printouts or screenshots.
Melissa Wolf, deputy director of the department’s family support division, told StateScoop that the shift from verifying regular paystubs or tax forms to accepting smatterings of mismatched documents took off in 2020, when many turned to gig work after losing their jobs during the health crisis.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in that nontraditional or gig work,” Wolf said. “We’ve seen it starting in ‘18 and ‘19 we started seeing an uptick, but then when the pandemic hit we’ve just seen that explode in our applicants. That gig income is really hard to verify because there’s so many different ways to get paid.”
Lexi Gervis, an executive with SteadyIQ, said the service filters and categorizes the information collected from financial institutions and then sends applicants a tidy report to review. Users aren’t allowed to edit the information, but they can catch mistakes before forwarding on the report to the state.
“We started this company to solve the problem of non-traditional income, but we’ve found in our work with state agencies that a lot of income has been hard to verify,” Gervis said. “There’s people who work for small companies that don’t show up in payroll databases, that don’t actually get their income verified easily, so we’ve expanded with that payroll connection.”
Among its customers, SteadyIQ counts Alabama, Georgia, Missouri and three other states that are planning to go live this quarter. Gervis said state labor departments needed new technology during the pandemic to manage independent contractors who before the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act had not been eligible for unemployment benefits.
Wolf said that a four-month test of the service in 2023 showed promising results for the three offices that participated.
“We’ve seen we could get to a decision sooner, approximately four days sooner,” she said. “We’ve also seen a reduction in the churn for the applications that were rejected because we didn’t have the correct information.”
While the test in 2023 included only a select few applicants, the statewide rollout next month could free up many more from the tedium of hunting down receipts. According to a caseload counter on the Missouri Department of Social Services website, the state manages 1.26 million Medicaid enrollees and 328,000 SNAP recipients.
“Our job and our mission is to serve our applicants accurately and timely,” Wolf said. “The best way we can do that is make sure individuals who are applying have their decision timely and the accurate number of benefits, and something like SteadyIQ really does help us make sure accurate and timely benefits are served to everyone who is eligible. It really helps both sides.”
