Shocking Report: JP Morgan Makes Over Half Billion Dollars Off Food Stamps!

A new report by the Government Accountability Institute finds that JP Morgan has made at least $560,492,596 since 2004 processing the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards of 18 of the 24 states it has under contract for the food stamp program.

Indeed, JP Morgan’s Christopher Paton told Bloomberg News that food stamps are big business for the big bank:

“We are the largest processor of food stamps in the country…[the EBT program] is a very important business to JP Morgan. It’s an important business in terms of its size and scale…. Right now volumes have gone through the roof in the past couple of years or so. The good news from JP Morgan’s perspective is the infrastructure that we built has been able to cope with that increase in volume.”

http://www.conservativehappenings.com/2012/10/report-jp-morgan-makes-over-half.html?spref=tw&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=bc617

Poll: 86 percent of Americans say government spending has not helped them

http://www.conservativehappenings.com/2012/10/poll-86-percent-of-americans-say.html

While some may be glad that a private company—not a government agency—is tasked with EBT transactions, the GAI report reveals that JP Morgan does not use the same fraud detection systems commonly used by today’s credit card companies.

In fact, federal and state agencies—not EBT processors—are the ones tasked with policing food stamp fraud.

That means EBT processors enjoy multiple pathways to profits that run counter to efficiency and strong oversight.

By making welfare inefficiency and abuse lucrative, the poverty industry has created a potentially toxic brew of corporate cronyism and government inefficiency that lets food stamp abuse enforcement slip through the bureaucratic cracks.

So how did EBT processors like JP Morgan land its lucrative half-billion dollars worth of contracts?

The GAI report, Profits From Poverty: How Food Stamps Make Corporations Money, says JP Morgan’s political donations to members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees (who oversee the food stamp program) skyrocketed once the bank entered the EBT market.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/10/01/Report-JP-Morgan-Makes-Over-Half-A-Billion-Dollars-Off-Food-Stamps

Profits From Poverty: How Food Stamps Make Corporations Money

http://g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/GAI-Report-ProfitsfromPoverty-FINAL.pdf

JP Morgan’s Food Stamp Empire

How the welfare state became a profit center.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/01/jp-morgan-s-food-stamp-empire.html

- DB

Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/shocking-report-jp-morgan-makes-over-half-billion-dollars-off-food-stamps/#FveHvbzZvzb7XBkB.99