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Two Kentucky farmers and a relative have been indicted for falsifying crop damage and exaggerating the size of their fields in order to reap crop insurance benefits.
A federal grand jury last week charged Randall Taulbee and James McDonald, of Bourbon and Nicolas counties, near Lexington, with a multi-year scheme to defraud the Federal Crop Insurance Corp. and companies that the FCIC reinsures. ARMTech Insurance Services, now part of Sompo International, paid out on some of the policies.
Also indicted was Cherie Lynn Noble, the sister of Taulbee and sister-in-law of McDonald, whom prosecutors said conspired in the fraud and made false statements to a federal investigator.
“It was the purpose of the conspiracy to profit or to avoid oversight through misrepresenting shares on crop insurance policies and underreporting crop production,” reads the indictment in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
Kentucky has seen its share of crop insurance fraud in the last few years. In January of 2022, an independent adjuster who helped tobacco farmers file millions of dollars in fraudulent claims was sentenced to three years in prison. More than three dozen people, including an insurance agent, have been charged in the scheme, and at least 20 have been convicted, according to news reports.
Federal prosecutors have called the fraud “pervasive and severe” in that part of Kentucky. A spokeswoman for the U.S....
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