Inside Missouri’s push to help gig workers access benefits more easily
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The state saw a reduction in benefits application rejections and churn after implementing an income verification platform for nontraditional workers.
Once a hallmark of American work culture, the conventional office job model has given way to more gig and freelance work in the U.S. The rise in demand for ride share drivers, food deliverers and other gig workers has prompted one state to reconsider how these individuals can claim benefits when their income isn’t recorded through traditional payroll stubs.
Since 2018, states like Missouri have seen an increase in residents with nontraditional work as the allure of additional income through gig and freelance employment “became very important for families to keep their heads above water,” particularly during the pandemic, said Melissa Wolf, deputy director for Missouri’s Family Support Division.
For an estimated 36 million independent workers in the U.S., applying for public benefits can be an arduous task because verifying their income to receive assistance means rounding up various documents like receipts, bank statements, digital Venmo payments or transactions through platforms like Uber and Doordash.
Eligibility workers must often sift through that unstructured data and repeatedly contact benefits applicants to confirm income-related information to process their claims, causing delays to getting benefits out the door, Wolf said.
Decades ago, most people received weekly or biweekly pay stubs, but “across the board, income and how we receive it has just changed,” she said.
To meet the needs of the growing gig workforce, Missouri partnered with SteadyIQ, an income verification solutions provider, to conduct a pilot program in 2023. The pilot aimed to streamline how individuals submitted income reports and how the state verified claims and administered benefits for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or child care assistance using SteadyIQ’s Income Passport platform.
An eligibility worker would send a link to invite a claimant to use the platform, and the claimant could then link it to their financial accounts — such as their digital wallets, bank or gig work accounts — to automatically create an income report, said Lexi Gervis, vice president of government affairs and public policy at SteadyIQ.
Caseworkers are then prompted to review and validate the reports, which are created and submitted within 18 minutes on average, Wolf said. State employees could even call claimants to conduct eligibility interviews while a person’s income report was being generated and clarify any questions or concerns in real time, rather than waiting days for a response, she added.
Using the Income Passport platform, benefits claims could be processed four days sooner than traditional methods, Wolf said. Officials also saw a near 25% reduction in application rejections due to incomplete files and a 6% decrease in touchpoints between caseworkers and benefits applicants to complete a claim.
A nontraditional income makes it more likely that an eligibility worker has to contact the individual more frequently, siphoning time and labor that could have gone toward processing more claims, Wolf said. But the Income Passport platform offered a return on investment “in what we consider our workforce not having to pick up a case again and rework it,” she said.
Gervis added that applicant churn — or the period when someone loses benefits coverage and re-enrolls in a program — was reduced during the pilot, and that cost estimations showed that the platform’s return on investment is six times that of the pilot program’s cost.
The results of the pilot program have prompted state officials to consider how to continue leveraging the platform in the future, Wolf said.
The Income Passport platform has also helped other state agencies, like Alabama’s Labor Department, streamline and modernize their benefits claims systems. The Alabama agency, for instance, shortened unemployment insurance claims processing times from up to 60 minutes to 1 to 2 minutes, and Louisiana saw similar gains with the technology as the time for UI claimants to receive benefits reduced from 21 days to less than 1 day.
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