Grassley Says USDA Not Totally Y2K Ready

December 22, 1999

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) says USDA is not 100% Y2K ready. USDA had announced Oct. 1 that all 344 of the department's mission-critical computer systems were Y2K compliant, but in a notice, USDA now says five applications contain problems that could cause defects in the way payment histories are recorded, says Grassley.

Grassley says the affected applications include production flexibility contract payment and over-payment processing for 2000 and for 1996-98; crop loss disaster assistance program payments and over-payment processing for 1998; the same for 1998 market loss assistance and 1995 acreage reduction program payments.

USDA has said that failure to correct the problems will not prevent payments from being processed after Jan. 1, says Grassley. But if conditions are not corrected before payments are processed after Jan. 1, erroneous data could be written to the affected payment history files and subsequently to the accounting files, he adds. That would divert resources unnecessarily to manually correct the affected files.