Goverment Pays Millions of Dollars to Dead Farmers

[PrisonerOfHope]

UNBELIEVABLE! GOVERNMENT PAYS MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO FARMERS: DEAD FARMERS
July 29, 2013 // By: Rebecca Brittingham /

The federal government is once again mismanaging money. However, rather than investing money in something worthwhile like the military, the federal government is paying out millions of dollars in subsidies to DEAD FARMERS.

The real issue is that the Agriculture Department is not doing the required routine checks to make sure the benefits are going to the right people according to a new government audit released Monday, The Washington Times reports.

For example, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), from 2008 to 2012, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) made $10.6 million payments to more than 1,100 people who’d been dead at least a year. Even better, the Risk Management Agency (RMA) paid $22 million to more than 3,400 policyholders who had been dead at least two years, according to The Washington Times.

It’s possible that some of the payments may have been legal if the work had been done before the farmers died. Nonetheless, the GAO says these two agencies are not performing routine check, like looking at the Social Security lists.

“Until and unless NRCS and RMA develop and implement procedures to have their payment or subsidy data records matched against SSA’s complete death master file, either through coordination with FSA or on their own, these agencies 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 investigators wrote.

The GAO says that the Agriculture Department has made progress. A recent audit shows that from from 1999-2005, hundreds of payments had been made to 172,801 dead people, totaling some $1.1 billion, The Washington Times reports.

Although the current rate of bad payments is slim compared to amount of subsidies going out, wasted money is still wasted money.

The Agriculture Department said, it does have some procedures to verify subsidies are going to the right person. However, the department said their procedures “were not effectively and consistently implemented to identify deceased individuals.”

The Agriculture Department recently signed an agreement so that it can get the Social Security Administration’s death master file. Perhaps this will solve the problem. However, nothing can erase the fact that the government payed millions of dollars to dead farmers.

- See more at: www.libertynews.com/2013/07/unbelievable-government-pays-millions-of-dollars-to-farmers-dead-farmers/#sthash.0lzYxRKk.dpuf