The Field Versus the National Appeals Division

GAO released a report on FSA's 2001-8 disaster programs, page 20. This paragraph seems to say the FSA field offices don't respect the NAD, perhaps unjustifiably, given the statistics.  This sort of culture gap isn't unexpected in an organization like FSA.

In commenting on crop disaster payments that they believed were based on suspicious crop insurance claims payments, some FSA county officials stated that they did not challenge or deny the applications for these crop disaster payments because they expected the applicants would appeal any challenge to USDA’s National Appeals Division.16 These officials added that in their past experience with appeals, USDA rarely upheld FSA couoffice decisions to deny payments. One official said that USDA generally approved appeals related to crop disaster applications unless the FSA county office produced evidence that the payment applicant did not meet program eligibility requirements. The official added that he did not collect such evidence because, at the time of the crop loss, he did not anticipate that a disaster program would provide assistance for those crop losses. However, according to our analysis of data from USDA’s National Appeals Division, FSA was more likely to be favored in an appeal related to the 2001 through 2007 crop disaster programs than were the farmers. We found the National Appeals Division upheld FSA’s denial of crop disaster payment applications for about 72 percent of the appeals, and the division overturned FSA’s denial, deciding that the farmer should have received a crop disaster payment, for the remaining 28 percent.

This also sounds like the gripes you hear from police (as relayed by conservative media and/or TV shows--I don't have any aquaintances in the police) about the lenient courts which let criminals go free.  But I wonder if FSA will respond to the audit by publicizing such statistics.