As Congress continues to work to hammer out a Trillion dollar farm bill, news has come out of the General Accountability Office that as much as $22 million in subsidies may have been paid out between 2008 and 2012 to farmers that have been dead for two or more years.

Because death records are not compared to the payouts in subsidies, the USDA’s Risk Management Agency has no way of knowing if they are paying out monies to individual farmers that have already died according to the General Accountability Office.

“Until and unless the Natural Resource Conservation Service and the Risk Management Agency develop and implement procedures to have their payment or subsidy data records matched against SSA’s complete death master file, either through coordination with FSA or on their own, these agencies cannot know if they are providing payments to, or subsidies on behalf of, deceased individuals; how often they are providing such payments or subsidies; or in what amounts,” the report stated.

This most recent audit is an improvement over the previous audit which showed that the Agricultural Department paid out $1.1 Billion to 172,801 dead farmers between 1999 and 2005.

The Agricultural Department has stated that it has begun to implement Social Security death records to compare with subsidy pay-outs towards the end of the GAO audit.