§8002 Implementation Funding and Information Management

Summary

The Secretary of Agriculture can use up to $55,000,000 from the Commodity Credit Corporation to pay administrative costs for carrying out title I and its changes. That money stays available until it is all spent. At least $5,000,000 but no more than $8,000,000 of that amount must go to creating the information system described below. The Secretary must build one modern information management system for the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation and the Farm Service Agency to help farmers access programs, protect data, meet agency needs, speed up data collection, cut duplicate requests, and lower costs. Existing agency data must be combined and reformatted to work in the common system. The Secretary can hire a private contractor and should prefer firms with prior FCIC experience and work on the ID rules in section 1515(f). Collected data may be shared with federal agencies that need it and with approved insurance providers for their insured producers. Current data-mining or data-warehousing agreements or requests should not be delayed. Congress may also appropriate whatever funds are needed to carry out the system for fiscal years 2003 through 2008.