USDA-IRS Memorandum on AGI compliance
Farm and Ranch January 11, 2010 The USDA recently announced it was partnering with the Internal Revenue Service to reduce fraud in farm programs. Coppess: “ The basic arrangement was announced last spring when Secretary Vilsack and Secretary of the Treasury Geithner mentioned that we were going to work together to track compliance with the AGI limit.” USDA Farm Service Agency Administrator Jonathan Coppess who says the formalized MOU is to verify adjusted gross income provisions for various USDA programs such as the Direct and Counter-cyclical and the Average Crop Revenue programs. Coppess: “Essentially what this means is producers will need to sign a consent form that gets sent directly to IRS. FSA is not going to be handling any of their tax information, any of their tax forms, anything like that. This will be done through IRS. They will consent to having this computerized check run by IRS and they then will see if individual producers may be out of compliance with AGI.” Coppess says producers have the ability to have a third party such as an accountant or an attorney verify results, or file an appeal if they are found out of compliance with the adjusted gross income provisions. The limits set in the 2008 Farm Bill are 500-thousand dollars non-farm average AGI for commodity and disaster programs; 750-thousand dollars farm average AGI for direct payments, and one million dollars non-farm average AGI for conservation programs. I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network. ?
