Officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture must be glad summer is winding down. It’s been a rough few months as federal auditors have issued two reports that found problems with administration of the nation’s bloated farm bill.
Agencies erroneously awarded millions of dollars, and because of poor documentation, many recipients will never be found. Both the department and Congress have roles to play in reducing future incidents.
The first audit came in June. The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm, found that the Agriculture Department mistakenly gave $36.6 million in disaster and conservation assistance to 6,336 dead people between 2008 and 2012. The audit cited inadequate internal controls and record keeping.
Then, at the end of August, the accountability office reported that the department’s Farm Service Agency and Natural Resources Conservation Service state offices had awarded funding to ineligible farmers. Many of them had income that exceeded the maximum allowed for support. Others had not provided all required documentation with their application.
When federal investigators looked at our region, it found that 38 of 41 files from Kansas, Missouri and Indiana were missing documentation. The payments might have been valid, but no one can verify them.
The agency did not examine every state and did not assign a national cost to erroneous payments. But it noted that the programs cost about $15 billion a year. If just one payment in 1,000 is improper, taxpayers lose $15 million annually.
There’s little indication that farmers are willfully cheating the system. Many errors result from complex rules. Nevertheless, the Agriculture Department should demand better from applicants by refusing payment until all documentation is submitted and applications can be better scrutinized.
The department also should more vigorously seek the return of past erroneous payments. Those are taxpayer dollars, and the American people deserve their money back when recipients earn more than the law intended or aren’t even alive any longer.
Congress could help, too, by streamlining the rules. Under the current system, many calculations differentiate between farm income and nonfarm income. Using a single adjusted gross income measure would make calculations easier and perhaps reduce errors.
Yet enacting that change would require passing the farm bill, and the House and Senate remain at loggerheads. Each has a different income calculation proposal, but the bigger sticking point is how much to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly called food stamps). SNAP is a frequent target for small-government conservatives. Both the House and Senate would make some cuts; the debate is over how much.
The farm bill is a gargantuan beast of government subsidies that might not be as necessary as it once was. One reason the Government Accountability Office has been investigating farm payments is that the agriculture industry has done quite well in recent years. Net farm income nationally more than doubled from 2009 to 2013, when it reached a record $128 billion.
Federal budget deficits remain high. An industry that is thriving does not need as much support from taxpayers.
