Your Federal Tax Dollars At Work
In his press conference today, President-elect Barack Obama “vowed . . . to scour wasteful spending from the federal budget to help offset an investment in a huge recovery plan to jump-start the ailing economy,” according to a NY Times story to be published on Wednesday.
He need look no further than the federal farm programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The GAO issued a report last month (requires Adobe) in which they told Congress:
“USDA does not have management controls, such as reviewing an appropriate sample of recipients’ tax returns, to verify that payments are made only to individuals who do not exceed income eligibility caps and therefore cannot be assured that millions of dollars in farm program payments it made are proper. GAO found that of the 1.8 million individuals receiving farm payments from 2003 through 2006, 2,702 had an average adjusted gross income (AGI) that exceeded $2.5 million and derived less than 75 percent of their income from farming, ranching, or forestry operations, thereby making them potentially ineligible for farm payments. Nevertheless, USDA paid over $49 million to these individuals.” (emphasis added)
Among the excuses reported by USDA officials were:
“resource constraints that hamper its ability to examine complex tax and financial information as well as a lack of authority to obtain and use IRS tax filer data for such purposes—contribute to the department’s inability to verify that each individual who receives farm program payments complies with income eligibility provisions. However, USDA does not routinely sample individuals receiving farm payments to test for income eligibility; instead, its annual sample selected for review is based primarily on compliance with eligibility requirements other than income. The 2008 Farm Bill directs USDA to use statistical methods to target those individuals most likely to exceed income eligibility caps. (emphasis added)
“The 2008 Farm Bill will increase the number of individuals likely to exceed the income eligibility caps. That is, with lower income eligibility caps under the 2008 Farm Bill, the number of individuals whose AGI exceeds the caps will rise, increasing the risk that USDA will make improper payments to more individuals.”
Sure looks like yet another example of Congress caring more about shoveling our tax dollars to their special interests rather than ensuring that federal programs are designed with effective internal controls.
HT: Taxpayers for Common Sense
UPDATE (11/26/08): In their coverage of the introduction of President-elect Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, the Wall Street Journal reports "the President-elect singled out farm subsidies for the rich," and based it on the same GAO report cited above. The Journal notes, however, "there is the small matter of where Senator Obama was on this issue when we really needed him . . . The vote in the Senate was 82 to 13. Mr. Obama missed the roll call, issuing a campaign statement . . . ." Another not so small matter involves the 535 members of the U.S. Congress.