> What bewildered the trackers is that on many of these stormy days, those buckets were not tipping. No tipping buckets pointed toward a severe spring drought. All cumulus, no accumulation. 

    > That same winter and spring, weather agency field technicians started phoning in a series of repairs to Colorado and Kansas rain gauges, also unlike anything their Pueblo bosses had ever seen. 

    > Local farmers, authorities came to believe, were systematically destroying vital weather data in order to falsely claim millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded crop insurance, for a drought they made up.

    > By the time they were done, two longtime farmers in southern Colorado were under investigation for tampering with federal installations and defrauding the government. Investigators settled criminal and civil cases against the farmers for $6.6 million in bogus insurance payouts. 

    > Then, facing jail for other crimes, the farmhand turned whistleblower, telling the government the tampering went back 10 years

    > In a recent report, the risk agency said a statistical sample of more than 2 million total crop policies estimated “overpayments” of $289 million, or 2.45% of $19.3 billion in payouts in 2022.

There's a number of ways to game metrics, depending on how they are implemented.

The more at stake, the more likely, and what is commonly being sought is a windfall payoff far in excess of the effort involved or penalties anticipated.

2.45% of payouts in 2022 doesn't tell the whole story.

What is meant by the figure is "2.45% and rising".

The rest of the $19.3 billion is a cash flow that's surely being tapped into in as many "creative" ways as possible.