[Vision2020] Millions in U.S. Subsidies Go to Dead Farmers

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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July 30, 2013
Millions in U.S. Subsidies Go to Dead Farmers By RON
NIXON<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/ron_nixon/index.html>

WASHINGTON — The federal government pays millions of dollars in farm
subsidies each year to farmers who have died, because the Agriculture
Department lacks the proper controls to make sure the money it sends is
going to the right people, a government
audit<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/31/us/politics/31farm-document.html>has
found.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress,
said the problem involved several agencies within the department.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service, which oversees the Agriculture
Department’s conservation programs, sent out $10.6 million in payments
between 2008 and 2012 to more than 1,000 people who had been dead for more
than a year, according to the report.

The Risk Management Agency, which administers the crop insurance program,
paid $22 million to more than 3,400 policyholders who had been dead for at
least two years. The G.A.O. said that some of those payments might have
been made while the farmer was still alive, but that there was no way to
know for sure.

The findings were released as the House and the Senate prepared to meet to
work out their differences on a farm bill that would greatly expand some
subsidies, like crop insurance. The report raises questions about the
ability of the Agriculture Department to monitor the programs for waste,
fraud and abuse.

The Agriculture Department generally agreed with the findings in the
report, but said it disagreed with the characterization that it did not
have sufficient controls in place to detect improper payments.

Still, the department acknowledged that its controls to identify deceased
individuals could be applied more effectively.

Controls over crop insurance, in particular, have been questioned after
government investigators found a huge fraud ring last year in North
Carolina that for decades siphoned over $100 million from the program. The
fraud ring involved insurance agents, adjusters, farmers and dozens of
others.

Environmental activists said the report pointed to the need for changes in
agriculture subsidy programs.

“Not only are unlimited crop insurance subsidies flowing to the largest and
most successful farm businesses, they are now going to deceased
policyholders,” said Scott Faber, vice president of the Environmental
Working Group, a Washington research organization, which has been critical
of farm subsidies. “This irresponsible use of scarce taxpayer dollars
reinforces just how broken the system is.”

The G.A.O. said the Agriculture Department had had some success in finding
improper payments. The department identified payments to nearly 173,000
deceased individuals from 1999 to 2005, the report said. The Agriculture
Department recovered about $1 billion in improper payments.

Still, the G.A.O. said more could be done. The auditors suggested that the
Agriculture Department use the Social Security Administration’s Death
Master File to identify payments made to dead individuals. The G.A.O. said
the agencies used an incomplete version of the data that did not include
all deaths.

Unless the agencies begin using the full Death Master File, they “cannot
know if they are providing payments to, or subsidies on behalf of, deceased
individuals; how often they are providing such payments or subsidies; or in
what amounts,” the report said.

The Agriculture Department said in May that the Risk Management Agency had
begun using a new computer program that compared the full Social Security
death data against crop insurance payments.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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