Happy farm bill week!

With vigilance like this, you can imagine how USDA will enforce the Pelosi payment limitation "reforms" in the subsidy lobby's new farm bill.

From the top of the fold of this morning's Washington Post, data detective Sarah Cohen reports that Deceased Farmers Got USDA Payments:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture distributed $1.1 billion over seven years to the estates or companies of deceased farmers and routinely failed to conduct reviews required to ensure that the payments were properly made, according to a government report.

In a selection of 181 cases from 1999 to 2005, the Government Accountability Office found that officials approved payments without any review 40 percent of the time.

So it turns out some deceased farmers aren't pushing up daisies after all. They're pushing up corn, wheat, soybeans, rice and cotton.

Dan Chapman did a great piece on necrosubsidies a while back for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (we'll track it down later this morning). EWG's star former analyst-turned-lawyer, Andrew Art, filed a legal complaint with USDA over 10 years ago about this matter, when Dan Glickman was running the Department. USDA's Office of Inspector General and the Justice Department looked into it, found out the government was doing nothing to see if taxpayers were providing crop subsidies to corpses, and of course USDA vowed to fix the problem.

Now the department tells GAO that the continued lack of enforcement couldn't amount to more than 1 percent of subsidy payments--it's mostly a harmless, fraud-free technical oversight.

Except the bureaucrats don't seem to have a pulse either.

The report cited a 1,900-acre soybean and corn farm in Illinois that collected $400,000 on behalf of an owner who lived in Florida before his death in 1995. The company did not notify the government of the death but certified each year that the dead shareholder, who owned 40 percent of the company, was "actively engaged" in managing the farm.

Most estates are allowed to collect farm payments for up to two years after an owner's death, giving heirs time to restructure their businesses and probate the will. After that, local USDA officials must certify every year that the estate is still farming and has remained open for reasons other than simply collecting subsidies.

But the GAO report found that the Agriculture Department depends on heirs and businesses to alert the agency to deaths and does not use other sources, such as Social Security records, to confirm eligibility.

The GAO study was requested by Sen. Charles Grassley, one of our heroes on subsidy matters. He stands up for stronger payment limits and now for, um, not paying subsidies to dead farmers. And here's where the two issues come together:

The GAO report said that, in some cases, people who had reached the annual limit on farm subsidies of $360,000 to an individual were able to collect additional money as a beneficiary of an estate.