Hartford - Ten additional state employees are suspected of filing erroneous claims for a post-disaster food stamps program, bringing the total number of potential fraud cases to 34, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said Thursday.

The workers may have submitted inaccurate income information on applications for the federal Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as D-SNAP, which was to provide food stamp aid to low-income residents who suffered property damage or income loss because of Tropical Storm Irene.

State officials have yet to publicly identify any of the accused workers, whom the governor has described as "relatively high wage earners."

The president of the Connecticut State Police Union, Andrew Matthews, confirmed that two of the 34 employees under investigation are state troopers but said news reports have wrongly named a trooper who was not fingered in the state's internal investigation of the fraud.

More than 74,000 Connecticut residents in about 23,700 households received the food stamp aid, including about 800 state employees. The program was administered in late September by the state Department of Social Services, which Malloy says followed the federal guidelines.

To help speed the distribution of the D-SNAP debit cards, applicants were allowed to self-report their income and savings and the number of people in their household.

"Those guidelines were designed in the wake of Katrina to get money out fast," Malloy told reporters Thursday. "Clearly, the honest disclosure was not honored by some number of the participants, and obviously I'm most concerned that some number of them are state employees."

Rich Rochlin, a lawyer for several accused workers, alleges that social services workers altered some applications so that more people could receive the food stamps.

Social Services Commissioner Roderick Bremby is undertaking a full review of the D-SNAP program's administration.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not respond Thursday to questions about reports of a federal probe into the alleged fraud.

j.reindl@theday.com