A Washburn-area man who pleaded guilty to making false statements related to crop insurance payments has been ordered to serve three years of supervised release and must repay nearly $380,000.
Kent Pfaff, 60, was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in Bismarck by U.S. District Judge Daniel Hovland as part of an agreement with prosecutors, according to U.S. Attorney Mac Schneider's office.
Pfaff will also be ineligible to participate in any U.S. Department of Agriculture program for five years.
"This result protects the integrity of the federal crop insurance program," Schneider said in a statement. "The United State's Attorney's Office and federal prosecutors will aggressively pursue fraud to protect honest producers and American taxpayers. I credit our career prosecutors and their partners for seeing justice was done in this case."
People are also reading…
Pfaff was indicted by a grand jury in 2022 after investigators accused him of providing false crop insurance claims between December 2019 and June 2020 by using a scheme known as shifting production. Under the scheme, crop production is overstated in some fields and underestimated in others "to manufacture or inflate claims to which they are not entitled," the indictment states.
Prosecutors said harvest data provided to Pfaff by a custom harvester did not match information Pfaff used for crop insurance claims.Â
Federal investigators in early 2020 discovered appraised soybean yields were four to five times higher than amounts Pfaff reported to crop insurers, according to Schneider.
The charge against Pfaff was a felony punishable by up to 30 years in prison, a $1 million fine and five years of supervised release.