Piloting the System That Became National Policy: The National Accuracy Clearinghouse Portal.

About the Client

The Mississippi Department of Human Services administers the state’s public assistance, child welfare, and family support programs, including SNAP. Mississippi led the NAC pilot consortium alongside four neighboring Gulf Coast states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana — all of which had experienced significant, disaster-driven population displacement in the years following Hurricane Katrina, making cross-border duplicate SNAP and D-SNAP participation a particularly acute program-integrity risk for the region.

Industry Context

SNAP serves more than 40 million Americans through a program with an annual federal budget exceeding $80 billion, and preventing duplicate or fraudulent issuance has long been a central program-integrity challenge. Before the NAC, states relied primarily on the federal Public Assistance Reporting Information System (PARIS), which could only identify dual participation on a quarterly basis — far too slow to stop duplicate benefits before they were paid. The pilot Iknow helped build offered something PARIS could not: near-real-time, point-of-application matching across state lines. That distinction proved decisive. Congress’s 2018 Farm Bill made NAC-style interstate matching a nationwide requirement, and by the mid-2020s the U.S. Department of Agriculture was actively onboarding all 50 states onto the national NAC system, with full compliance mandated by 2027 — a policy outcome traceable directly back to the results this five-state pilot produced.

Current Situation

At the time of the grant award, no operational system existed to identify SNAP or D-SNAP dual participation across state lines in anything close to real time. Mississippi’s Department of Human Services needed a partner capable of designing, building, securely hosting, and supporting an entirely new multi-state data-matching portal — one that could align five independent state agencies, USDA oversight, and a shared technology platform around a single, trusted source of truth.

• No real-time detection capability. Existing federal tools like PARIS could only flag dual participation quarterly, long after duplicate benefits had already been issued.
• Five independent state agencies, one system. Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi each had their own processes and priorities, but needed to operate from a single shared portal, dataset, and set of business rules.
• High-sensitivity, high-volume data. The system had to securely handle Social Security numbers, birth dates, and participation records for millions of SNAP recipients across multiple state systems.
• Building trust in a first-of-its-kind pilot. As the first interstate SNAP dual-participation system of its kind, the NAC Portal had to prove both its technical reliability and its practical value to justify any future expansion beyond the five pilot states.

• Establish a single, documented set of business and technical requirements agreed to by all five participating states and USDA/FNS.
• Design, develop, and deploy a secure web portal enabling participating states to search for dual SNAP/D-SNAP participation via single, batch, or XML queries.
• Deliver full reporting and usage-tracking functionality so states and USDA could monitor system performance and outcomes.
• Provide the documentation, training, help desk, and ongoing maintenance needed to sustain a five-state operational system.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow anchored the project in a structured, consensus-driven requirements process before beginning any development, then carried that same discipline through design, build, deployment, and ongoing operational support of the portal.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Multi-State Requirements Session. Iknow led a three-day, in-person requirements session in Atlanta attended by representatives from all five state governments, USDA/FNS, and LexisNexis, identifying, discussing, and documenting the detailed business and technical requirements that served as the “source of truth” for the entire solution.
• Portal Design & Development. Iknow was responsible for the complete design, development, and deployment of the NAC Portal on Drupal, an open-source web content management platform, including application design and development, user interface design, and technical development project management.
• Reporting Functionality. Iknow designed and built all portal reporting functionality, enabling participating states to create reports and track system usage.
• Support Infrastructure. Iknow developed help documentation, online help, and help desk support, and delivered training to users across all five states.
• Ongoing Maintenance. Iknow provided continued portal maintenance throughout the engagement to keep the system reliable as transaction volume and state participation grew.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked as a subcontractor to LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which provided the underlying High-Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) data-matching technology and the LexisNexis Secure Data Cloud hosting environment — a proven, fully redundant platform supporting more than 50 terabytes of data, billions of records, millions of daily transactions, and tens of thousands of active users. Iknow’s Drupal-based portal served as the user-facing layer atop that infrastructure, with Fantail Consulting & Technologies engaged as an additional subcontractor. Iknow coordinated directly with all five state agencies and USDA/FNS throughout the engagement.

Aligning Five States Around One Shared System

Five state agencies with different priorities and workflows could easily have produced five different sets of requirements. Iknow addressed this by convening all stakeholders — the five states, USDA/FNS, and LexisNexis — in a single, structured three-day requirements session, producing one documented set of business and technical requirements that governed the entire build.

Building a Trustworthy Interface Atop a Massive Shared Data Platform

The NAC Portal had to give caseworkers in five different states confidence that a single, batch, or XML search would return accurate, real-time matches drawn from a shared, highly sensitive dataset. Iknow addressed this by integrating its Drupal-based portal tightly with LexisNexis’s HPCC data-matching architecture and Secure Data Cloud hosting, and by backing the system with comprehensive help documentation, help desk support, and hands-on training for state users.

Operational Outcomes

• Delivered a fully operational, secure, five-state SNAP/D-SNAP dual-participation matching portal supporting single, batch, and XML search modes.
• Established a single, documented requirements baseline that served as the “source of truth” for the entire multi-state solution.
• Delivered complete reporting, help documentation, help desk, training, and ongoing maintenance in support of five state user bases.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

The pilot’s impact was substantial and measurable: Mississippi and Alabama each achieved an 80 percent decrease in dual participation during the initial 12-month pilot period, and the five participating states realized a combined $5.6 million in preventive cost savings. Those results validated the NAC model so convincingly that Congress mandated its nationwide rollout in the 2018 Farm Bill — meaning the system Iknow helped design and build for five Gulf Coast states became the technical and operational template for a program integrity system now being adopted by all 50 states.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered the operational NAC Portal within the engagement period, with measurable dual-participation reductions evident within the first 12 months of pilot operation — impact that has continued to compound as the underlying NAC model has scaled to a national program in the years since.

Core Skills

• Government & Public Sector Program Integrity Solutions
• Multi-Stakeholder Requirements Facilitation
• Web Portal Design & Development
• Systems Integration
• Training & Help Desk Support

Methods & Frameworks

• Structured, multi-party requirements elicitation workshops
• User interface and reporting functionality design
• Technical documentation and end-user training development

Technologies & Tools

• Drupal open-source web content management platform
• LexisNexis High-Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) and Secure Data Cloud