While there is much talk but little action about school lunch cheating in North Carolina, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is taking the issue more seriously. Christie has issued an executive order creating a task force to investigate fraud in the free and reduced-price lunch program.

Bloomberg reports:

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is looking for a new way to measure student poverty as part of his plan to overhaul how school aid is distributed.

The state currently measures “at-risk students” by determining the number of children receiving free or reduced- price school lunches, and districts with students in that program get more aid. Those lunch counts are inaccurate and subject to fraud, Christie, 49, a first-term Republican, said today at a press conference in Trenton.

“We’ve all heard the stories of abuse and misuse of this program,” Christie said. “A report by the state auditor has revealed high levels of fraudulent enrollment in the program, resulting in possibly tens of millions of dollars being misdirected or misspent.”

Christie has said that the state’s school-funding formula sends too much money to low-income districts that continue to underperform, while suburban systems are shortchanged. He proposed raising school aid by $213 million in his budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, and seeks changes that would give more money to districts according to their enrollment of poor children.