Part of the criticism on the A&O stemmed from a study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on costs associated with administering the crop insurance program. 19 In 2009, GAO concluded that the structure of A&O reimbursements “present[s] an opportunity to reduce government spending without compromising the crop insurance program’s safety net for farmers.” According to GAO, the method for calculating the A&O reimbursement should be redesigned to better reflect reasonable business expenses, in terms of dollars per policy, rather than crop prices. Using crop prices, GAO said, generated a “kind of windfall” for many insurance agencies/agents as insurance companies, using.
