Low-income families who receive benefits via electronic cards issued by Florida’s Department of Children and Families spent most of Monday in the dark, thanks to a pre-planned outage. DCF used the day to change its systems as the department switches card vendors. Spokesman Whitney Ray says the department chose to rely on social media rather than on sending out letters to notify recipients…
“I talked to our social media person just a while ago and she said we had about two or three people who were asking what happened,” Ray says. “So there are people who didn’t get the message, but for the most part it’s not what you’d expect in terms of having a one-day outage in terms of communication and contact with the department.”
Ray also says DCF used its partner businesses to get the word out. But on the DCF Facebook page, benefits users complain of clerks at businesses erroneously telling them they had to zero out their card balances when their additional money was deposited before Monday’s outage and of one drug store clerk saying a person’s card was declined because Obamacare had done away with food stamps.
