Agency Stands By Stimulus Jobs Numbers
By Don | November 23, 2009
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.
Post #2476
7 Comments | Post a Comment
Former Dem…I’m with you! I never thought I would ever live through such times in my life in this country. Their arrogance and contempt for the people is unbelievable. And the President is a disgrace. I have never been so ashamed. And it will probably get worse…which is already hard to believe.
What else should we expect with the new Axis of Evil, Obama, Reid, and Pelosi in charge.I find it sickening the way he has treated our Military in Afghanistan, either support them, or get them the hell out of there. Giving Holder and his Civilian Trial for these Terrorists will only serve to harm our country even further. What happened to our Treason Laws?
What an entire waste of tax payer money that website was! And now they don’t want to fix it to state the correct figures ! So, I can’t help but think that it is just more of their same old Communist / Marxist propaganda at work ; where they believe that the more times you tell (or post) a lie, the more that the “masses”/ people will believe the lie/lies. (sigh)
Look at the bright side of things! Our beloved liberal friends, so superior to us in every way, have created dozens of new congressional districts to send porkulous funds to.
Perhaps that stimulous went to those top secret FEMA districts. Has anyone watched those videos ?
I have seen them, SSDD <laughing>
Try going to http://www.pjtv.com for SNL type Conservative comedy, and real news.
Oh, and by the way, just how good is Obama’s Secret Service? Can just anyone walk into a State Dinner? Now they are talking about bringing charges to the couple who got into the White House, I do not believe they should be indited, it was not their fault they were able to get in…
November 23 at 5:00 pm | #1 | Link
What do you expect from the least transparent, most lying and corrupt government ever in this United States. More damage has been done by their lies and corrupt politics than in the history of this country.