Trail Blazing
In 1999, before the Agricultural Risk Protection Act of 2000 (ARPA) formalized the alliance between the Risk Management Agency (RMA) and the Farm Service Agency (FSA) to increase program integrity, FSA staff in Nolan County suspected that fraudulent claims for crop insurance and disaster payments had been made by six area farmers.
Ware Brown, FSA's Nolan County Executive Director, said, "Once we received RMA's data download of insured Nolan County producers, which is also used by FSA to administer the 1999 crop disaster program, there was no doubt that some local producers had made false crop insurance claims for cotton and grain sorghum crops that were never planted."
Based on their personal knowledge and the data evidence in hand, Nolan County staff notified their Texas state FSA office who, in turn, called on investigators from RMA's Southern Regional Compliance Office and USDA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The subsequent investigation resulted in charges leading to five guilty pleas and two ongoing investigations. Of the four sentenced so far, restitution totaling over $1.1 million has been ordered in addition to jail time.
"I know that 99.5 percent of our county producers are honest and hard-working people who conscientiously tend to their crops. Through their candid interviews with investigators, many of them helped us get to the bottom of these fraudulent claims," Brown continued. He anticipates that the publicity generated by these cases and the increased vigilance already displayed by his office will deter future attempts to defraud government programs.
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