The Challenges of On-Line Versus Bricks: Banking and FSA

Had an experience the other day which IMHO shows the hurdles FSA and other agencies face when they try to combine bricks and mortar offices with online service.

The situation: dealing with my bank, with which my wife and I have several accounts, savings, checking, brokerage, IRAs, etc., basically operating under an umbrella which they call the PMA. They're the result of a history which started back in 1968 when I set up an account in DC in a bank which has been merged and remerged and remerged, and as my wife and I made decisions about savings and investments and consolidating accounts.

Anyhow, we have a branch office near our home, but we mostly do our banking online.

Though I haven't seen an organization chart for the bank, I deduce that they have a unit responsible for their branches,  a unit responsible for PMAs, a unit responsible for their brokerage accounts and IRA accounts, and a unit responsible for online banking. So we go in the branch to get a safe deposit box and straighten out a situation with the 1099 for 2015 taxes (I won't go into detail on that, because it's an embarrassing story--recalling the old lesson for software: when all else fails, read the manual.)

So the banker with whom we talked couldn't resolve our problem, so she made a call to the PMA help desk unit. We talked with the PMA person, without success, because she needed to talk to the online banking person.  At that point we decided to go back home and work the phones from there. I called the online banking help, who couldn't resolve it, and wanted to talk to the PMA people.  About that point I realized that it was my screw-up so I said thank you and hung up.

What's my bottom line:  in the old days dad would take the egg check and milk check to the bank, deposit them, get cash.  He knew the tellers and the bankers because it was a locally owned bank.  I'd imagine the general operations were very similar to those of the ASCS county office back in the 60's or before.  But as banking got more complicated, with different lines of business,, and more automated, that's changed, as witness my frustrating day.  More complexity means less mastery by the teller/clerk--even though the person is likely more educated, specialization means less total comprehension.

And the effect of the specialization/automation online operation is to create a frustration trap for customers and operators: 90 or 99 percent of the time it's a routine operation which goes smoothly, but the minority of the cases become much more problematic simply because there's a lack of centralized knowledge. [added--The point with my bank is the interaction among their various silos/units; the point with FSA would be the same.  The fiscal silo and the conservation silo and the payments silo all look separate to the Washington bureaucrat; they're one thing to the producer in the field.]

How successful has FSA been in moving its producers into online program servicing?  I don't know.  But organizing and educating to make that process work will be very challenging.

Eggs--Score One for My Mother

My mother used to get very upset in the 50's and 60's.  Not upset at me--I was the apple of her eye.  But upset at the people who were dissing the "perfect food", perfect in her mind, the egg.  On our farm dad did the cows and mom did the hens, so she was far from an unbiased observer as doctors and experts declared that cholesterol was the key to heart attacks, and we should all eat healthy by avoiding cholesterol-rich foods. Hens were her thing, a part of her identity, and she was a hard-headed German-American, so no one could persuade her that government experts knew better.

So today, some years after she died and many years after she gave up her hens comes word that the government is changing its advice.

Mom, you were right and us government types were wrong.

Cross Agency Collaboration

Steve Kelman in FCW on cross-agency collaboration:

"There is a common view among public management experts in academia and government that, as problems government faces become more complex, successful collaboration across agency boundaries grows increasingly important for delivering good results.
That collaboration is not easy. I remember reading in political science courses I took in graduate school decades ago about cross-agency coordinating councils. The view then was that it is extremely difficult for these activities to be effective, because agencies simply used them to advocate for the approach they took to problems, and tried to get other agencies to go along with that, rather than actually adapting their own behavior. Furthermore, these tended to be low-priority activities, to which organizations assigned the people least likely to be missed from their regular jobs."

 That's exactly what happened in Infoshare days--each agency had their pet idea which we tried to sell to the other agencies.  SCS wanted a laptop for field work, for example.  I wanted a new basic producer and farm data setup.  We didn't have the power to commit our agencies, not really, so when the impetus from the top faded, the whole house of cards collapsed. 

Actively Engaged

Politico anticipates the proposed rule defining "actively engaged" in farming, as the lead bit in an interview with Secretary Vilsack. 

The Agriculture Department is getting ready to tell a lot of people who’ve been getting farm subsidy checks without lifting a hay bale, swinging a pitch fork or driving a tractor that they’re cut off

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/usda-city-farm-subsidies-114955.html#ixzz3QyJyf6vf

It will be interesting to see what's proposed and how it fares.  My own bet--nothing will be finalized in this administration. 

Definitions Revisited

USDA is posting about its data and the brave new world of open data.  Among its goals for the coming year is this:

 " Work with AgGateway on standards and definitions – so “corn” or Common Land Unit (CLU) has the same definition for the data producer and the data users "

Now that aim isn't bad--presumably it can be met by being explicit in the definitions, but I'm reminded of the difficulty in the previous century of getting to common definitions.  To the layman and the big shots a common definition of "corn" between RMA and FSA and NRCS just makes sense.  But when you get into the nitty-gritty there's the qualifications and conditions which entangle the definition into the agency's mission and programs.  A Venn diagram would show circles which overlap maybe 95 percent of the area, but not 100 percent.

Acreage Reporting

Ever since 1933 reporting and checking crop acreages has been perhaps the biggest single workload item in AAA/ASCS/FSA's portfolio.  Hence threats to it raise the alarms:  

"Continuing on the subject of acreage reporting I want to assure you that NASCOE is leaving no stone unturned as we monitor the acreage reporting project that allows producers multiple options to file a report ( at FSA, with crop insurance, on line or other). Your leadership team understands that acreage reporting is the bedrock of all that we do at FSA and it is important that integrity in this process is maintained"

With the development of precision agriculture, and the growing value of having data tied to a specific tract, twill be interesting to see how acreage reporting changes in the future.


From the NASCOE newsletter

Farewell to System/36?

From the NASCOE newsletter

While I am sure most of your NASCOE officers will be covering some of the highlight of the past Calendar Year I will be focusing on the NEA Programs side of NASCOE. This year we should finally say goodbye to the wretched beast some call the 36 or AS 400. Of course, this good bye brings something new(ish).
We just received MIDAS release 2.0 which we’re told will work without a single hiccup.
We will at last have one system of record for maintaining Producers name, address, and TIN.
We are also anticipating new MPP software, new MAL software, and as well new software for ARC/PLC, which is already out. We’re also now using different software for FSFL’s.

 Those were the days, my friends. I remember them well (cue Maurice Chevalier in Gigi, a stage production of which is now at the Kennedy Center).   I remember Chris Niedermeyer as "trail boss" in 1989? talking about running out of space on the System/36 and the need to immediately get new hardware.   And I'm pleased to see the "one system of record," only about 16 years late.

WTO-Doha Restrictions on Agricultural Payments

In the late 90's, IIRCC, we were just starting to deal with our commitments under the WTO, commitments which restricted nations' ability to provide support to their farmers. There were different color categories, depending on whether the payments had the effect of distorting trade.  One reason for changing from deficiency payments tied to planted acreage to direct payments based on past history (i.e, the Freedom to Farm formula in 1996) was to change the categorization.  The theory was that payments based on planted acreage increased production in a country, payments based on historical base acreage delinked payments and production.

Anyhow, years have passed.  Generally countries have reduced their supports and because negotiations for new WTO agreements failed, we haven't heard much about the subject in recent years.  Today though  Farm Policy quotes an article:

"...only the United States wouldn’t be able to meet the commitments assigned to it under draft 2008 Doha texts. However, that calculation is based on U.S. subsidies from 2012 and doesn’t factor in changes in U.S. agricultural policies in the new farm bill.
“Under the proposed commitments, the United States would have exceeded its trade-distorting subsidy limits by $3.6 billion in 2012. A diplomatic source said it’s unclear whether the farm bill will help or hurt in this area particularly because it’s not clear whether the U.S. will classify crop insurance as trade-distorting in its next subsidy notification.”

 My impression is that crop insurance used be considered as something which encouraged production; certainly EWG believes that, especially with regards to the Great Plains. 

The NUCC--a Great Discovery for a Lover of Bureaucracy

Who knew there was a NUCC in our world? 

What, you may ask, is a NUCC?

It's the National Uniform Claim Committee, the proud sponsor of 1500_Claim, which is one of the government's most popular publications.

Essentially it tries to standard healthcare claims. As they say:

"The NUCC replaced the Uniform Claim Form Task Force, which was co-chaired by the AMA and CMS and resulted in the development of the 1500 Claim Form, a single paper claim form for use by all third-party payers. With the transition of the medical community to electronic data interchange and the proliferation of data element definitions among various payers, it became essential that an organization be established to maintain uniformity and standardization in these areas. The NUCC is responsible for maintaining the integrity of the data sets and physical layout of the hard copy 1500 Claim Form.

From the provider viewpoint, non-uniform data elements have caused significant frustration, claims billing and processing delays, and rejections. From the payer viewpoint, claims that are not in the required format may be resubmitted several times before they can be processed. The result is a very labor-intensive and costly business practice for providers and payers.

Through an iterative process, the NUCC used existing implementation guides, data dictionaries and results from ongoing standardization efforts within the health care industry to consolidate the many current data sets into one set.  The NUCC continues to work to optimize, as necessary, coordination of implementation within the health care industry, working with ASC X12N as required, to resolve data maintenance and standards problems that arise from the NUCC's work.

Gloom and Doom

"Gloom and doom" was a popular term in the '50s--if I remember Republicans accused the Dems of embracing gloom and doom when Dems pointed with alarm at all the shortcomings of Ike's administration and the general state of the world.

On a day when spring seem far away, I thought I'd highlight a contemporary gloom and doomster, Leslie Gelb, writing as part of a Politico survey of learned people forecasting 15 years ahead:

The world of 2030 will be an ugly place, littered with rebellion and repression. Societies will be deeply fragmented and overwhelmed by irreconcilable religious and political groups, by disparities in wealth, by ignorant citizenry and by states’ impotence to fix problems. This world will resemble today’s, only almost everything will be more difficult to manage and solve.

Advances in technology and science won’t save us. Technology will both decentralize power and increase the power of central authorities. Social media will be able to prompt mass demonstrations in public squares, even occasionally overturning governments as in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, but oligarchs and dictators will have the force and power to prevail as they did in Cairo. Almost certainly, science and politics won’t be up to checking global warming, which will soon overwhelm us.

Muslims will be the principal disruptive factor, whether in the Islamic world, where repression, bad governance and economic underperformance have sparked revolt, or abroad, where they are increasingly unhappy and distained by rulers and peoples. In America, blacks will become less tolerant of their marginalization, as will other persecuted minorities around the world. These groups will challenge authority, and authority will slam back with enough force to deeply wound, but not destroy, these rebellions.

A long period of worldwide economic stagnation and even decline will reinforce these trends. There will be sustained economic gulfs between rich and poor. And the rich will be increasingly willing to use government power to maintain their advantages.
Unfortunately, the next years will see a reversal of the hopes for better government and for effective democracies that loomed so large at the end of the Cold War.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/15-big-breakthroughs-in-2015-114486_Page3.html#ixzz3QKzclszz  

(I think he's by far the most pessimistic seer.)

Enjoy the weekend.