The roughly 350,000 Mississippians who rely on SNAP for help affording food are still waiting to receive full November benefits—more than a week after a historic government shutdown ended—due to technical issues.

Mark Jones, the chief communications officer at the Mississippi Department of Human Services, said the agency is working quickly to fix the issues, which stem from the decades-old computer systems that the agency relies on to process payments.

“It’s our systems. We have 35 and 40-year-old systems that run COBOL,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on Thursday, referring to a programming language that dates back to the 1960s.

Before the shutdown ended and allowed the resumption of full SNAP payments, the MDHS had scheduled all Mississippi SNAP recipients to receive 65% of their payment on their scheduled monthly date. But when the agency sought to push out full payments after the shutdown ended, “they weren’t sending … because we had already put 65% in there,” Jones told the Mississippi Free Press.

The agency is working to remedy the issue, but when asked if he expected the problem to be solved and full payments sent before the end of November, Jones was uncertain. “I don’t know,” he said, reiterating the complexity of working with systems that are ancient by technology standards.

MDHS says that clients whose issuance dates are set for Friday, Nov. 21, will receive 65% of benefits, just as those whose issuance dates were between Nov. 4 and Nov. 14 did. All recipients will eventually receive the remaining 35% of their November allotment after the issues with the system are resolved.

“We know families are looking for these payments. We are working as fast as we can to get these payments out,” Jones said.

MDHS announced in May that the agency is working on a $180 million upgrade to its systems to replace the aged technology, but Jones told the Mississippi Free Press that “that’s not going to be fully done until 2027.”

The Mississippi Free Press has published this list of resources, including food banks, for those who need help.

More information is available at www.mdhs.ms.gov.

Award-winning News Editor Ashton Pittman, a native of the South Mississippi Pine Belt, studied journalism and political science at the University of Southern Mississippi. Previously the state reporter at the Jackson Free Press, he drove national headlines and conversations with award-winning reporting about segregation academies. He has won numerous awards, including Outstanding New Journalist in the South, for his work covering immigration raids, abortion battles and even former Gov. Phil Bryant’s unusual work with “The Bad Boys of Brexit" at the Jackson Free Press. In 2021, as a Mississippi Free Press reporter, he was named the Diamond Journalist of the Year for seven southern U.S. states in the Society of Professional Journalists Diamond Awards. A trained photojournalist, Ashton lives in South Mississippi with his husband, William, and their two pit bulls, Dorothy and Dru.