Pigford Witness Report: Applicant Claimed Discrimination by Nonexistent Chicago USDA Office, Was Paid Anyway

The following is based on an interview with a current US Department of Agriculture employee who has worked for more than 20 years for the USDA:

It’s been ten years and I’ve really dealt with Pigford. It was a hard time. Frankly, I don’t like to talk about it anymore.

There was a lot of fraud. People collected money who had never stepped in the door of a USDA office. They had to prove they had been discriminated against to get their money so to get around that fact they would say they were never given an application. That’s how they got around the fact that there was no evidence of them having visited the USDA.

The burden of proof in Pigford was basically on us, the USDA, to prove that we didn’t discriminate against someone. How do you prove a negative like that? It’s really impossible.

I was assigned to Washington for a while to process Pigford claims. We saw claims come in from affluent areas. There were claims from Palm Beach and Palm Springs, and they said they were black farmers. One applicant said they were discriminated against by the Department of Agriculture’s Chicago office. There is no USDA office in Chicago. They got paid anyway.

There was a lot of pressure from Washington, D.C. to approve claims they knew were fraudulent or false. All people basically had to do was fill out a form. In Washington, D.C. they didn’t want to to hear about anything other than getting claims processed. I personally witnessed cases where the person in charge, [name redacted], a deputy administrator for farm loans, told us to tweak applications to help them get through. If they were missing information or something, we were supposed to add it to help them be approved.

Some employees at USDA turned to the other side and saw a way to make money. In Pine Bluff Arkansas there was an employee that would recruit people and help them fill out the paperwork. They would take 50% of the Pigford money that someone would collect.

The purpose of Pigford was to garner the vote, to buy black votes. It’s dangerous because we are segmenting society, pitting blacks, Hispanics and others against each other, we are fragmenting society, chiseling society.