After a week in which stimulus jobs reported created or saved on a government web site were proven to be inaccurate and after a promise by the White House to fix the errors the agency in charge of the site has said that there are no plans to adjust the overall jobs numbers.

From the Wall Street Journal

The government agency charged with overseeing the economic-stimulus program says it has no plans to change its claim that the package directly created or saved 640,329.17 jobs through September, despite its own admission and statements from the White House that the number is not accurate.

Ed Pound, spokesman for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said that it will not revise the number of jobs posted on its Web site, http://www.recovery.gov, which is based on quarterly forms filed by tens of thousands of recipients of stimulus money detailing how they spent the money and how many jobs it created or saved. The first forms were filed and released to the public in October.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, issued a report last week saying that there were “significant issues to be addressed” in the accuracy of the recipients’ forms.

The report said that “many entries merit further attention,” noting confusion among recipients about how to count the number of full-time equivalent jobs they had created or saved, as well as more basic problems filling in the dozens of entries on the forms.

In an initial review, The Wall Street Journal found hundreds of reports inflating the job total by at least 20,000 because recipients mistakenly counted college part-time work-study positions, employees who got small pay raises, indirect jobs recipients assumed to have been created as result of their spending and people working on decades-old government contracts as full-time jobs created or saved by the stimulus.

The board says only stimulus recipients can change the reports they file, and that federal agencies are responsible for checking the reports. But last week, in the wake of news reports which suggested that stimulus money had gone to non-existent congressional districts, the board did correct the details of the districts listed in the forms.

“Unless we find significant errors causing public confusion, we are not planning further corrections,” Mr. Pound said Friday.

The GAO report also found that as many as one in four reports had not been reviewed by a federal agency.

Some of the recipients contacted by The Journal said they had tried to correct their reports when they discovered the mistakes, but had been unable to do so after Oct. 29. The recovery board confirmed that recipients will not be able to fix their own reports until it is time to file new reports in the next quarterly reporting period in January.

The Lone Wolf Housing Authority in Oklahoma, for example, claimed to have created or saved 162.5 jobs with $46,489 of stimulus money it received for a housing-renovation project, on the assumption it should include the jobs of the 150 workers at the factory that manufactured the new siding it used.

The housing authority’s secretary, Myrna Hess, said she began trying to fix the mistake on Oct. 29 but kept getting error messages and then was locked out of the system.

A White House official said that the administration was talking to the board about ways to update the data after the reports had been filed.

But the administration has also argued that inaccuracies in the data are minor, saying that errors have been found in less than 5% of reports so far and that the number of jobs created or saved could have been undercounted as well as overcounted.

Ed DeSeve, the White House’s senior adviser on the stimulus plan, told reporters Thursday that the data “may be imprecise” but that he thought the jobs numbers were “a good representation of what’s going on” and were supported by some economists’ estimates of the overall economic climate.

“The American people care a lot more about our success in creating jobs than our precision in counting jobs,” he said.

 

Exactly what success is DeSeve talking about?  The unemployment rate has risen from less than 8% when the stimulus bill was passed to over 10% and even Sen. Dodd thinks the real rate may be closer to 25% when you add in discouraged workers. 

The numbers aren’t imprecise they are flat out wrong and the administration should just admit this and force the bureaucrats at www.recovery.gov to correct the errors now and not wait for the next filing period. It’s our money we deserve accountability.

 

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