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Executive Summary
As Americans increasingly eat healthy foods, the demand for organic foods has skyrocketed. Consumers will pay to limit their exposure to pesticides and other food toxins. But premium prices have attracted unethical food producers, often resulting in fraudulent labeling. While the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) developed national standards regulating organic food production through the National Organic Program (NOP), the government has been unable to hire and train adequate numbers of accredited certifying agents. As of 2009 the NOP reported only 55 domestic and 40 foreign accredited certifying agents (NOP, 2009) to monitor all organic products entering our food supply. To protect consumers, we suggest that the industry hire CPAs to attest that the producers, distributors and suppliers of organic foods meet certain standards. CPAs have long performed such attestation services for other industries in order to add credibility to these products and services.
The Food Marketing Institute (2007) has also called for the addition of private sector auditing and certification programs. This need for assurance of the quality of organic foods provides a unique opportunity for CPAs to provide attestation services to consumers regarding the reliability of organic food producers. The CPA profession should thus promote and develop this opportunity to provide these types of services.
Introduction
Swindlers have long mislabeled food products to defraud consumers. Centuries ago merchants added burnt peas, beans and chicory to what was sold as coffee, and painted sweets with toxic substances like red oxide of lead, red sulphuret of mercury, or lead chromate to give them appealing, bright colors. The age-old human propensity to profit from consumers unaware of the value of what they buy continues today, most obviously in exploiting the demand for organic food products.
In 2007 the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection reported many incidents of improperly labeled organic foods. The Cornucopia Institute, a government and corporate organic food industry watchdog, filed complaints with the Wisconsin regulators and the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that Walmart repeatedly mislabeled organic foods in five states by using product placement policies that mixed organic and conventional produce. Walmart, calling these events isolated incidents, stated that it would implement new stocking methods to help prevent further recurring incidents (Wong, 2007).
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