Hartford - The number of state employees who misreported their income to receive free food money after Tropical Storm Irene will likely grow beyond an initial group of 15 as the state's internal investigation continues, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said Thursday.

The Malloy administration has yet to publicly identify the workers accused of underreporting their income and other eligibility information to defraud the federal Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as D-SNAP.

Speaking with reporters, the governor said the 15 employees already fingered in the probe stood out for being "relatively high wage earners." He declined to give specifics about their compensation or comment on reports that some of them make more than $100,000 a year.

The program, administered in late September by the state Department of Social Services, offered food and grocery money for low-income households affected by the storm. The program was authorized by a federal disaster declaration.

Hundreds of people waited in hours-long lines outside social services offices to obtain a D-SNAP debit card. The average card contained $684 that could only be used to buy food. One card held as much as $1,200 in food cash.

In total more than 74,000 people in more than 23,700 households received aid, including about 800 state employees. The vast majority of those workers are believed to have made legitimate claims.

The governor has acknowledged that others besides state employees may have also defrauded the D-SNAP program, but says his present focus is rooting out the guilty state workers so that they can be fired and face criminal prosecution.

Malloy said the D-SNAP flap underscores the need for better communication in state government between workers and managers.

"We need to do more work in creating an environment in which people are rapidly sharing their concerns when it comes to how government is operating," Malloy said.

The D-SNAP applicants could self-report their income, the number of people in their household and the balances of their checking and savings accounts. For example, take-home monthly income following Irene was not supposed to exceed $2,186 for a single person or $2,847 for a household of two. A person's "liquid assets" such as cash on hand and bank account balances, counted toward the income limit.

The governor said on Wednesday that at least one of the 15 workers listed a dead relative as living in his or her household to get more money.

Officials have said that the fraud was uncovered by the social services department after a worker there noticed the names of public-sector colleagues with high salaries on the D-SNAP list. The department and its commissioner, Roderick Bremby, are doing an audit of the program and its beneficiaries.

j.reindl@theday.com