GAO report urges greater scrutiny of Coronavirus Food Assistance Program payments

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has found some problems with the USDA's handling of the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program.

The full report, titled, "Coronavirus Food Assistance Program: USDA Should Conduct More Rigorous Reviews of Payments to Producers," is available online.
The report examines USDA’s distribution of CFAP payments totaling $31 billion to agricultural producers, by commodity type and state, as well as payments to historically underserved producers, according to a news release.

The report also examines the extent to which USDA verified producers’ compliance with the program’s rules. 

“We found USDA Farm Service Agency’s reviews to verify that CFAP payments were based on accurate information were limited in their usefulness for several reasons,” the report said.

For example, the report said the FSA selected producers for review without fully considering risk factors, such as large claims for producers of livestock and similar commodities with which FSA may not be familiar. 

“We reviewed 90 producers whose claims we consider to have risk factors and found that over half did not support their payments, which are therefore potentially improper,” the report said.

Specifically, the report said: 

• FSA accepted producer-generated documents, such as spreadsheets, which are difficult to verify, as support for claims; and
• FSA did not monitor the quality of CFAP reviews that its county offices conducted.

The GAO report made recommendations for FSA to conduct more, rigorous reviews of the program. The agency generally agreed with the recommendations, according to the report.

The four recommendations to the Farm Service Agency, according to the release,  were: 

• The Administrator of FSA should conduct additional spot checks of CFAP payments and use a more risk-based approach to selecting producers for review. This approach could include focusing on producers of commodities not generally covered by other FSA programs and producers that received large payments. 
• The Administrator of FSA should issue guidance directing the agency to identify factors, such as large claims for commodities with which FSA is unfamiliar, that county offices should consider when selecting producers for CFAP spot checks. 
• The Administrator of FSA should direct agency officials conducting CFAP payment spot checks to (1) use support generated by third parties; or (2) if such support is not available, document why support self-generated by the producer was accepted. 
• The Administrator of FSA should direct state offices to monitor the quality of the county offices' spot checks for CFAP. Such monitoring could include a review of selected spot checks to ensure their accuracy.