FNS Documents & Resources

The Agricultural Act of 2014 required the establishment of a Multi-Agency Task Force to provide coordination and direction for USDA Foods administered by FNS. FNS submits this report covering the period of January 2021 through July 2022 to the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry and the House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture.

This collection is an extension, without change, of a currently approved collection for maintaining the National Disqualified List of institutions, day care home providers, and individuals that have been terminated or otherwise disqualified from CACFP participation.

The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) will discontinue the requirement for vendors to use high security seals to secure USDA Foods deliveries as of July 1, 2023. 

This webinar details guidance and best practices for incorporating integrity-oriented design features into web-based school meal applications. 

This report responds to the requirement of PL 110-246 to assess the effectiveness of state and local efforts to directly certify children for free school meals. Direct certification is a process conducted by the states and by local educational agencies to certify eligible children for free meals without the need for household applications. 

Statistical models were designed to estimate national improper payments due to certification error on an annual basis using district-level data. This enables FNS to update its estimates of national improper payment rates for the NSLP and SBP in future years without having to conduct full rounds of primary data collection.

The memorandum outlines the conditions under which eligible recipient agencies can provide meals to volunteers staffing distribution sites and charge as a TEFAP administrative expense.

The second Access, Participation, Eligibility and Certification Study (APEC II) included a follow-on report that provided statistically-derived state-level estimates of school meals erroneous payments. However, while APEC II provided a rough indicator of relative risk for groups of states (e.g., higher than average, about average, lower than average), it was not a state-representative direct measure, and creating actual annual measures of such erroneous payments at the state level using APEC methodology is cost-prohibitive. This report explores alternative approaches to developing measurement-based state-specific estimates that are responsive to year-to-year changes in the actual underlying rate in each state. It also provides cost and burden estimates for the implementation of each of these methods.

FNS is conducting the Erroneous Payments in Child Care Centers Study. This study will focus on CACFP operations in participating child care centers and their sponsoring organizations. This study is necessary for FNS's annual compliance with IPERA in the child care center component of CACFP.

This is the 11th in a series of annual reports that examines the administrative accuracy of eligibility determinations and benefit issuance for free or reduced-price meals in the National School Lunch Program.