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Monday, July 23, 2007

USDA Sends Farm Subsidies to Deceased Landowners

Think federal regulation is just government wasting your tax dollars to meddle in your business? Well, a new GAO report suggests that lax regulatory oversight has led the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to send over one billion dollars in farm subsidies to deceased farm owners.

According to the report, issued at the behest of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) of the Senate Finance Committee, the department continued mailing checks in the name of dead estate owners with little or no investigation, failing even to cross-reference Social Security numbers with other databases. From a sample of only 181 cases from 1999 to 2005, GAO found that officials failed to review 40 percent of payment subsidy requests and relied solely on businesses and family members to alert the agency of the deaths.

To make matters worse, the GAO report points out that in many cases, already wealthy corporate-owned farms often received these payments, and often the sums of these payments exceeded the USDA's own yearly-allotted limits to individuals. Grassley is requesting that the IRS investigate these payments to see if these estates, normally subjected to higher taxes, properly accounted for that money in tax reporting.

In its defense, the USDA cited insufficient staffing and competing priorities as the reasons for failing to conduct reviews. One can only wonder how much tax-payer money would've been saved if a few extra regulatory officials were hired. Maybe proper regulation isn't so wasteful after all.