WASHINGTON, Aug. 8, 2013- The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) is asking for input on the updates it made for producers applying for coverage under the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP).
NAP is administered under the supervision of the Commodity Credit Corporation. FSA state and county committees carry out the program, which provides assistance for losses of commercial crops and other agricultural commodities that are not provided catastrophic risk protection.
In fiscal years 2012 and 2013, FSA delivered web modernization projects to enable NAP applications on the web. According to USDA, the agency enhanced applications to retrieve data from acreage reporting software to reduce manual data entry errors and prohibit a payment from being issued without an acreage report on file.
Also, producers are no longer required to provide multiple Notices of Loss when multiple crops are affected by the same disaster enter, reducing the total time burden for producers and FSA.
The agency estimates the public reporting burden to average1.33 hours per response. The average travel time, which is included in the total annual burden, is estimated to be one hour per respondent
According to the notice in the federal register, FSA seeks comments on the updated data collections to help evaluate whether the collection of information is necessary for the proper performance of the FSA; evaluate the accuracy of FSA’s estimate of burden; enhance the quality and clarity of the information to be collected; and minimize the burden of the collection of information.
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