According to a recent poll, 71 percent of Washingtonians believe we would have enough money to balance our budget, if only government eliminated all that waste and fraud. And no doubt, when many of these wannabe fraud-busters imagine the culprits, they envision corrupt and/or lazy Olympia bureaucrats.

Well… they may wanna look a little closer to home:

YAKIMA — A prominent Pasco farmer and winery owner pleaded innocent Monday to federal charges related to an alleged attempt to defraud the government of insurance payments for potato crops. And three other Mid-Columbia farmers face similar allegations.

[…] The indictment documents filed Jan. 11 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington in Yakima allege that from 2001-06, the four men and their companies conspired to make false reports to the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation to defraud the corporation of more than $9.5 million in insurance payments.

The scam was actually pretty clever. One of the defendants would plant a variety of potato not generally suited to processing for french fries, then sign a contract with the other defendants to deliver exactly that. When the crop, as expected, failed to meet specifications, the farmer would collect federally backed crop insurance payments. And they continued to plant this variety and sign these contracts year after year.

Sweet.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Washington’s rural economy is in any way dependent on defrauding the federal crop insurance system and the govmint so many folks out there seem to hate so much. No, at least some of Washington’s rural economy is dependent on defrauding the multibillion dollar federal clean-up program at Hanford.

8 replies on “Yet More Evidence of Rural WA’s Ruggedly Independent Self-Sufficiency”

  3. So they go to all the trouble of planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, and shipping potatoes nobody wants?! Why not perform exactly the same effort with, you know, potatoes that people lust after? If the state hadn’t cut the higher-education budget so much, maybe these guys could have gotten into the Fraud 101 class at the local community college.

    The only way this story makes any kind of sense is if the combined insurance payments and salvage value for the crappy crop (for livestock feed, instant mashed potato mix, school-lunch filler, etc.) exceeds what they would get for selling an optimal product. If that’s the case (and the news article doesn’t give much detail), then the insurance program is mis-calibrated. The point of insurance is to avoid the risk of a catastrophic but statistically unlikely loss, not to provide near-equivalence for a typical year of toil.

  4. Golob had a post a while back about the time that he was spending in Wasilla, AK. It was all about how the city is totally run by government funds, yet the teabagger/bootstraps/anti-government groupthink was strong among the population. It really reminded me of my 15 years of living in the Tri-cities. I sent that story to a bunch of my friends in the Tri, and boy was I told how wrong I was by nearly all of my friends. The ones that did complain all either work for the county or at Hanford. Most of them vote republican for every election, because they want less government and they hate liberal Seattle taking all their tax dollars. It makes my fucking head hurt.

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