Farm Programs: USDA Needs to Do More to Prevent Improper Payments to Deceased Individuals

United States. Government Accountability Office.

United States. Government Accountability Office.

关键词: Government accountability -- United States.;    agriculture and food;    auditing and financial management;    farm programs;    letter report;   

RP-ID  :  GAO-13-503
RP-ID  :  655638

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since 2007, the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Farm Service Agency (FSA), which administers various programs for farmers that help support farm incomes and provide disaster assistance, has established procedures for preventing improper payments to deceased individuals, including, on a quarterly basis, matching payments to program participants with the Social Security Administration's (SSA) data on deceased individuals. In addition, FSA state and county offices review and verify whether payments made to deceased individuals are proper or improper. Overall, these procedures have enabled FSA to identify thousands of deceased individuals who were paid $3.3 million in improper payments after their dates of death, of which FSA has recovered approximately $1 million. GAO reviewed a generalizable random sample of payments to deceased individuals that FSA identified as proper and found that 9 percent did not have sufficient support to be coded as proper. More monitoring to ensure that county offices' coding of payments is supported by documentation could help reduce the error rate."