Friday, December 14, 2007

$4 Million Owed and Bureaucratic Rules

There's a North Dakota case where a farmer was got money fraudulently, was convicted of fraud, forfeited $3.9 million in assets and served 4 years in jail. Now FSA has sent demand letters to the man and his associates (who weren't convicted), asking for repayment of the farm program payments. Here's a version of the AP story.

What's not clear is whether the forfeited assets should have gone against the debts (in which case there's a bureaucratic foulup among Justice, USDA, and FSA) or not. In any case, it's not clear why FSA didn't send demand letters to the associates 4 or more years ago. Unfortunately, when you don't often have such cases, they tend to get messy because no one remembers how to process them.

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