Recovery.gov Correcting Errors Regarding Stimulus Job Numbers

Government officials are responding publicly to the recent discovery by ABC News that the stimulus job reporting website Recovery.gov contains numerous errors and reporting inconsistencies.

Appearing on the Daily Show, Vice President Joe Biden emphasized to show host John Stewart that though the Recovery.gov website shows data for hundreds of non-existent districts, the number of jobs and projects are real. Biden is quoted as saying “Every single solitary penny that got sent out there to a state, a construction company, a nonprofit had to be accounted for.” Biden goes on to say that errors on the site were due to agencies that “did not know how to count.” He also claims that out of 130,000 reporting agencies, 70 of them reported incorrect data. It’s unclear how only 70 occurrences of incorrect agency reports could result in over 400 occurrences of non-existent U.S. districts. According to CNN.com, Recovery.gov is now combing through the data on the website to try and clean it up. The non-existent state districts originally on the site have begun to be removed and the money has simply been added to a category titled “unassigned congressional district”. Once the initial clean up is performed, each form associated with the “unassigned money” will be examined for a zip code and the correct dollar amount will be moved to the correct congressional district. Forms that do not contain a zip code must be filled out again by the original submitting agency. Although Biden discussed the inconsistency in reporting congressional districts, he did not discuss other questions about the stimulus funds which were raised earlier this week. Some of these questionable uses of stimulus funds include providing raises to employees rather than actually creating new jobs and the reporting of jobs that have not even started yet. All in all, it seems as though it will be early in 2010 before the statistics are accurate enough for U.S. citizens to determine whether the stimulus act has actually created as many jobs as the government claims.