Just a friendly reminder that on January 1, the clock began on the second Recovery Act recipient reporting cycle. Prime and sub recipients have from January 1 to January 15 to submit their reports to FederalReporting.gov, recipients will edit these reports from then until January 22, and agencies will then have until January 29 to review the reports. Everything will be published on Recovery.gov on Saturday, January 30.

The important thing to remember about this reporting cycle is that recipients have until the beginning of the next reporting cycle to edit their reports. Last cycle, recipients could not change their reports after the initial review period passed, which was a problem since many mistakes were not caught until the agency review period. The Recovery Board, which is in charge of Recovery.gov, will be posting the corrected reports every two weeks, starting on February 10.

This change in how recipients edit their reports will be important as recipients adjust to the new guidance issued at the end of December, which created a somewhat simplified job counting formula. The lateness of the guidance and its difference from last cycle's formula will surely lead to confusion among recipients, so the added error correction time will almost certainly result in better data. Hopefully it'll also translate into a less bumpy reporting cycle than last time.

Image by Flickr user Huffmans used under a Creative Commons license.