J...S.. and Federal Employee Fraud

I was going to put her name in the post, but then decided I didn't want to link her, even inadvertently, with employee fraud. J... was a longtime employee of USDA who retired before I did (although she was younger than I, her husband was older and was retiring) to play golf in Florida with her husband. She was very good. I suspect, though, she got "senioritis" on her last days, in other words she really didn't give a f... about personnel's rules and regulations. They had a long checkout list of various things that had to be done before leaving, some of which amounted to updating various databases.

To make a long story short, I don't think J...S... hit all the bases on her way out. Anyway, if you go to the USDA's website to find her, you can, because she's still in the employee telephone directory.

How does that link to fraud? Last week when I was out of action, there was some publicity given to the federal employees who were getting Metro farecards from the government (to divert them from the roads to public transit) and selling them. In at least one case, a former employee kept receiving the cards for 5-6 years after leaving--i.e., the database wasn't updated.

Getting Databases to Talk

Just talking to Dell, which has the same problems in getting systems coordinated as the Federal government. Their sales department and the outlet departments have separate databases. And this is the company that led us into the 21st century!

Slow Blogging--PC Problem

Yes, again. :-(

Purdue and Farm Bill

See this website, established by Purdue to provide background for the farm bill debate.

Politics Works--Kansas Offices Aren't Closed

Apparently USDA does respond to pressure from the field and Congress--this article
describes the changes made in the office closure plan for Kansas.

Parry O'Brien, R.I.P.

The Times obits reports the death of another barrier breaker. Like the 4 minute mile, the 60 foot shot put and the 16 (I think) foot pole vault were athletic barriers when I was growing up. O'Brien broke the second right after Bannister broke the first, proving that the "barriers" had no more reality than the sound barrier (which Chuck Yeager had broken earlier).

Now, I guess, rather than seeing "barriers" we see statistical distributions. Such thinking doesn't allow for or create individual heroes to the extent that Bannister and O'Brien were. I'm sure it's more realistic, but I'll be an old fogey and mourn the loss of heroism for a minute.

(There, now I'm over it.)

About Time--Ronald Reagan Gets Modernized

I received a compliment, I guess, for being fair to GW, so I've got to be snarky to Reagan. This Post bit buries the news that Ronald Reagan is being modernized. One would think it would be the lead. Just another proof that the Post is liberal. (It's the carrier.)

Pollan's Back, and Can't Count

Michael Pollan resumes his role of causing my blood pressure to go up (I've got to look at why I get so much more emotional about him than many other people who write more poorly and say more stupid things).

This time, he can't count:

"Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.)"

Pollan has, I'm sure, mentally conflated "corn" and "feed grains" and "upland cotton" and "extra long staple cotton" to get his "five crops". Actually, the farm bill affects barley, grain sorghum, and oats as well as the two cottons.

Oh, one other thing. I'm talking about the "farm bill" of 1981, not the 2002 version. Currently direct and counter-cyclical payments are also made for canola, crambe, flax, mustard, rapeseed, safflower, sesame and sunflower, including oil and non-oil varieties and peanuts. See this fact sheet.

Brits and GIS

Apparently the British tried to be ahead of us in using GIS and IT to compute and issue payments. This article details some of the problems, including trying to implement a new program while downsizing the agency (sound familiar?). Specifically:

"Investigations by the National Audit Office and the House of Commons rural affairs committee found that implementation was rushed, partly for political reasons, and reforms were introduced at the same time as a £130m "change programme" involving cutting the Rural Payment Agency's staff numbers by half.

The agency's confidence was based on its appointment of a high-profile director of information systems on a salary of £225,000, and the contracting of a leading IT services firm, Accenture, to supply the claim processing system.

Sheer volume

Accenture executives told subsequent investigations that the IT worked as specified. But the system could not cope with the volume of inquiries from farmers - at least 10 times greater than expected. One reason was that, unlike in countries such as Germany, there was no minimum payout. The agency had to handle 14,000 claims for less than €100 each.

However the biggest reason for the overwhelming traffic was to do with mapping. The system set the minimum size of a parcel of land as 0.1 hectare, three times smaller than that permitted by the European Union. In all, there were 1.7m parcels of land on more than 75,000 farms. Calculating payments on these parcels required a sophisticated mapping system, involving digitised satellite images and aerial photography aligned up with conventional mapping data. The geographical data came from private sources, including the specialist firm Infoterra, as well as the state-owned Ordnance Survey."

USDA Releases SSN

This piece in the Times and this in the Post discuss this site which "revealed" SSN's. As I understand, some USDA agency (probably Farmers Home Administration, now mostly part of Farm Service Agency) included SSN in the loan number (makes some sense because FmHA loans were to the person, covering all operations). When the data was passed to Census for its database (which subsequently passed the data to fedspending.org the SSN part of the number wasn't edited. In a way, it's a tempest in a teapot--it was discovered when a farmer got bored and googled her farm's name. When the loan data came up, of course she recognized her SSN. IMO it's unlikely a casual hacker would have deduced that 9 of the 15 digits represented the SSN (presumably the others are state and county code and check digit, but maybe not.

Whatever--it's another argument for doing away with SSN's.