Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's Link: Farm Insurance Fraud is Cheating Taxpayers out of Millions, at the Los Angeles Times. From the story:

The federal investigator took the witness stand and described the crime scene: a sprawling field clogged with boulders, native grasses and knee-high sagebrush.

The defendant, a California farmer, had said the site was a 200-acre wheat field. But the investigator found no tilled soil, no tractors, no plows. In fact, she testified, she found no wheat.

The field was just a field — and a prime example, federal prosecutors allege, of a wave of agricultural insurance scams sprouting across the nation.

Such crimes are being perpetrated by farmers who fraudulently claim that weather or insects destroyed their crops to cash in on a government-backed insurance program. Some cheats never bother planting at all. Others sell their harvests in secret and then file claims for losses, collecting twice for the same crop.

One North Carolina tomato grower, armed with a camera and a party-size bag of ice cubes, created a mock hailstorm in his fields and swindled the federal government out of $9.2 million.

These growers — along with crooked insurance agents and claims adjusters — are using the program to bilk insurance firms and the U.S. government out of millions of dollars a year, according to prosecutors, industry officials and high-tech experts who review questionable claims for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Locally, this was the largest case I can remember:

“There is an ongoing conspiracy, involving crop insurance agents and farmers, to defraud the federal crop insurance program” through “money laundering,” the paper reported Kevin Ganger, a special agent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of the Inspector General, as saying in an affidavit for a search warrant executed at a Versailles farm Sept. 13.
According to the report, that affidavit was used to obtain nine other search warrants for farms in Mercer and Auglaize counties in Ohio, as well as Jay, Wells and Adams counties in Indiana. The investigation was initiated, according to the paper, based on information from “several sources” that two insurance agents were furnishing Darke County farmers with falsified actual production history forms to increase indemnity payments for federal crop insurance claims.
Ganger noted that the Versailles farmer received FCIC and other crop insurance payments of $66,612 in 1997, $208,257 in 1998 and $288,128 in 1999.

Not the type of attention farmers need.  Naked Capitalism is loaded with good links today.