WASHINGTON (AP) – The Agriculture Department on Wednesday acknowledged making improper payments to farmers worth more than $2.8 billion last year.

Officials explained that most of the payments involved missing or incomplete paperwork.

“We take this very seriously,” said Chuck Christopherson, the department’s chief financial officer. “We know this is something that we can address and that we can fix.”

Federal law requires agencies to track erroneous payments, such as checks sent to farmers who were not eligible for a particular program, or payments for the wrong amount of money.

The amount of improper payments in fiscal 2006 was about 11 percent of farm program payments, the department said. The fiscal year ended on Sept. 30.

Officials said nearly all of that, 10 percent, was because of missing or incomplete paperwork. As of last year, officials included in their tracking payments for which paperwork was missing or incomplete, such as a form that went unsigned.

“While I certainly take seriously our jobs to ensure that every T is crossed and every I is dotted, I believe it’s noteworthy to distinguish between the two types of errors here,” said Teresa Lasseter, administrator of the Farm Service Agency, which runs most farm programs.

FSA is pursuing a plan to consolidate more than 2,300 county offices in an effort to modernize a Depression-era network with too few trained employees and some computers so old they can’t connect to the Internet.

The local offices are where farmers sign up for government payments and loans.

“We can’t really tell you that smaller-staffed offices or larger-staffed offices fared any better” at preventing improper payments, Lasseter said. “But certainly, better-trained staff with more tools to do their jobs would help us.”

The department found fewer than 1 percent of improper payments in its farm programs in 2005, but it tracked fewer programs, reviewing about $38 billion in payments, versus $65 billion in 2006.

Separately, the department found $1.6 billion in improper payments made through the food stamp program. That amount was about 5.84 percent of all payments, Christopherson said, down from 5.88 percent a year before.

In April, the department’s inspector general said the agency loaned $9 million over six years to farmers who shouldn’t have gotten loans. The audit followed a 1999 report by the inspector general that identified $24.1 million in improper or questionable loans.