Farmers Home Administration

Implementation Issues Concerning Four Sections of the Food Security Act Gao ID: RCED-89-71 June 19, 1989

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Farmers Home Administration's (FmHA) lack of progress in applying the homestead protection, lease/buy-back, conservation easement, and softwood timber provisions of the Food Security Act of 1985.

GAO found that: (1) because of inadequate FmHA records, it could not fully determine why some of the provisions were not more widely used and could not offer suggestions for increasing activity; (2) distressed FmHA farm program borrowers have not used the four provisions extensively; (3) FmHA allows borrowers to receive benefits for the same land under more than one Department of Agriculture (USDA) program; (4) as of June 1988, FmHA approved five borrowers for the softwood timber program; and (5) FmHA charged interest rates on softwood timber loans that were generally below the maximum rate permitted by legislation and used simple interest in its calculations.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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