USDA provides various programs that assist farmers and landowners through its subsidiary agencies FSA, NRCS, and RMA. FSA provides benefits to farmers through various programs, including farm commodity and crop disaster assistance programs authorized in the 2008 Farm Bill. FSA has overall responsibility for administering these programs, including ensuring that all recipients meet eligibility requirements and do not receive payments in excess of program limitations. Farming operations—whether individuals or entities—applying for benefits must file a farm operating plan and an annual acreage report with their local field office, and if any changes occur that could affect program eligibility, such as changes affecting one’s status as actively engaged in farming, the farming operation must file a revised farm operating plan. These documents record farming information, such as the name of each individual with an interest in the farming operation, which crops are planted on each field, and the farming practices used. FSA uses this information to determine farm program payments, including payments for various agricultural disaster assistance programs. Most farmers receive farm program payments directly from FSA as individual operators. Some farmers, however, use legal entities to organize their farming operations, thereby reducing their exposure to financial liabilities. Many FSA farm programs have statutory payment limits that set the maximum payment amount that an individual can receive per year. For example, for one of FSA’s farm commodity programs, the annual payment limit is $40,000 per individual. FSA carries out these responsibilities through its headquarters office, 50 state offices, and over 2,100 field offices. In a 2007 report, we recommended that FSA implement management controls, such as matching payment files with SSA’s death master file, to verify that an individual receiving payments has not died and to provide reasonable assurance that the agency does not make improper payments to deceased individuals. We also recommended that FSA determine if improper program payments have been made to deceased individuals or to entities that failed to disclose the death of a member and, if so, recover the appropriate amounts. The 2008 Farm Bill required FSA (1) to promulgate regulations that (a) describe the circumstances under which payments may be issued in the name of a deceased individual and (b) preclude the issuance of payments to, and on behalf of, deceased individuals who were not eligible for the payments and (2) to at least twice each year reconcile SSA’s numbers of all individuals who receive commodity program payments. NRCS administers voluntary programs that offer financial and technical assistance to eligible landowners and producers to help manage natural resources in a sustainable manner. Through these programs, the agency approves conservation program contracts or conservation easements, which provide participants financial assistance for planning and implementing conservation practices to save energy and improve resources, such as soil and water on agricultural lands and on nonindustrial private forestland. These programs can be divided into two categories—working-lands programs and easement programs.working-lands programs, NRCS provides program participants with financial and technical assistance through contracts, which are generally in effect for up to 10 years, to implement conservation practices on agricultural land and nonindustrial private forestland. Under easement programs, NRCS purchases conservation easements to restore, protect, or enhance grasslands and wetlands and provides assistance to eligible entities to purchase development rights to keep productive farm and ranch lands in agricultural uses. According to NRCS officials, when an NRCS program participant dies, NRCS considers the contract canceled, unless the participant had identified an executor or other estate Under representative to act on his or her behalf to transfer the contract to an eligible successor or to complete the contracted activities. By promoting crop insurance, the federal government has played an active role in helping to mitigate the effects on income of production risks—droughts, floods, and other natural disasters—as well as price risks that farmers face. RMA administers the federal crop insurance program, including controlling costs and protecting against fraud, waste, and abuse. The agency partners with 17 approved insurance companies, which sell and service the federal program’s insurance policies and share in a percentage of the associated risk of loss and opportunity for gain. The federal government subsidizes about 60 percent of the insurance premiums the insurance companies charge farmers and also pays the companies an allowance for administrative expenses, which is intended to cover the companies’ expenses for selling crop insurance policies and providing customer service to policyholders. Unlike payments made by FSA and NRCS, subsidies for crop insurance premiums are not paid directly to policyholders but can be considered a financial benefit to them. Without a premium subsidy, a policyholder would have to pay the full amount of the premium. The allowances for administrative expenses can be considered a further benefit to these policyholders, since these allowances are paid on their behalf. RMA also shares with insurance companies payments made on policyholders’ claims for losses. Since 2007, FSA has established procedures for preventing improper payments to deceased individuals, including matching payments to program participants with SSA’s data on deceased individuals. Nevertheless, the SSA data used by FSA for this match have been incomplete, and our review of a sample of payments made to deceased individuals raised some questions. Since our 2007 report and enactment of the 2008 Farm Bill, FSA has taken steps to implement and strengthen procedures to prevent improper payments to program participants who have died. Specifically, in 2007, FSA began computer matching its payment data with a list of deceased individuals, directed county and state offices to review the results of this match, and established procedures and updated guidance accordingly. According to FSA officials, to identify program participants who had died, in fiscal year 2007 FSA began computer-matching program participants’ names, addresses, and Social Security numbers—stored in FSA’s primary database of farm program participants—against SSA’s death master file. This match identifies any program participants who have died. FSA then compares this list of deceased program participants against its list of participants to whom payments were made during the previous quarter and creates a report listing deceased participants who have received payments. In 2008 FSA began performing these matches quarterly—twice a year more than required under the 2008 Farm Bill; FSA also directed its county and state offices to review these reports to determine whether payments were proper or improper. Every quarter, county officials code each payment to a deceased participant as proper or improper, and state officials review and verify the counties’ coding. According to FSA officials, most payments found to be improper are to be recovered by FSA. By the end of December 2010, FSA had issued a final rule clarifying the regulations governing payments earned by a person who died and describing strengthened procedures for matching program participants with SSA’s death master file and having county, then state, offices check which payments to deceased individuals were proper and improper. The agency further improved this process in 2011, by moving from electronic spreadsheets to a web-based system, which, officials told us, greatly improved data accuracy and ease of reviewing and coding payments made to deceased individuals. In addition to implementing this quarterly data-matching and review process, FSA has revised and updated its handbooks since the 2008 Farm Bill to include guidance related to making payments in cases where a program participant has died. The revised guidance defines the respective roles to be played by county and state offices, clarifies how county offices are to record payments to deceased individuals as proper or improper, and offers guidance for both county and state offices reviewing these records. Agency officials may also take other steps to find out about deceased program participants: in some counties, they may check obituaries in local papers or telephone program participants each year to ask if any changes have occurred among eligible participants. Overall, according to FSA officials, establishing these procedures has enabled the agency to identify thousands of individuals—17,409 in fiscal year 2011 and 13,684 in fiscal year 2012, for example—who were paid after their dates of death. Of a total of 28,613 deceased individuals who were paid in 2011 and 2012, FSA determined that 1,799 individuals, or about 6 percent, were paid a total of $3.3 million in improper payments during the 2-year period. According to figures from FSA’s DMF Review Report for fiscal years 2011 and 2012, FSA has recovered approximately $1 million of these improper payments and, according to agency officials, continues to pursue the remaining amount of improper payments. The version of SSA’s death master file against which FSA matches its payment records has been incomplete. Specifically, FSA has been matching its payment records against the public version of the death master file. This version—containing about 87 million death records and available to the public for purchase—lists all deaths since 1936 that have been reported to SSA by sources other than the states, such as hospitals and funeral homes. According to SSA documentation, to ensure confidentiality under section 205(r) of the Social Security Act, death records provided to the administration by the states are not to be publicly disclosed, except to other agencies that pay federally funded benefits. In May 2013, we testified before the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Homeland and Governmental Affairs that according to SSA officials, the complete death master file contains approximately 98 million records, about 11 million more records than the public version of the file. Therefore, until the agency begins matching its payment records to the complete death master file, it may continue to miss deceased individuals to whom it should no longer be making payments. During our review, FSA took steps to seek access to the complete death master file, and in January 2013, FSA received approval from SSA to obtain such access, along with NRCS and RMA. FSA officials said that they have been coordinating with NRCS and RMA on how they will use, share, and pay for this access. As of early June 2013, however, FSA had not received the complete file from SSA or incorporated these data into its quarterly reviews of payments made to deceased individuals.