Ms. Fraser, I actually had people in my office who had boxes full of photocopied documents on their applications--attachments and things they had to send in. Almost every farmer I talked to said they were forced to go to accountants and spend—even on the simplest applications—$1,000 a year on administration. These are farmers who aren't paying their bills, who are trying to fight off their creditors and stay on the farms, but most of them are spending $2,000 or $3,000 a year just to have the accountants try to get them through this maze. I've found very few farmers who were anywhere close to capable of doing this on their own. The accountants were telling me that they're in the business of giving estimates on income tax and accurate advice and so on. None of them would give any advice to people. They'd help them with their application form, but the last thing they're going to do is try to estimate what benefit the farmer would get out of these programs, if any.
Would that be a fair comment, that farmers would have to spend a lot of money on accounting help in order to get into this program?