The "Spot Check List" (SCL) approach is an important tool developed to help detect and deter fraud, waste, and abuse in the U.S. crop insurance program. This article carefully examines whether the SCL approach affects producers' claims filing behavior and provides insights with regards to the effectiveness of this program. Using proprietary county-level SCL data and panel data econometric procedures (which controls for both observable and unobservable confounding factors), we find evidence that counties with more than three producers included in the SCL tend to have better actuarial performance (i.e., less claims) after being informed about listing in the SCL. This indicates that the SCL procedure seem to be a promising tool for fraud mitigation in the Federal crop insurance program. Acknowledgement :