Devaney Letter Causes Ridiculous Stimulus Data Quality Brouhaha; Media Bark Up Wrong Tree

[1]Earlier today, Earl Devaney, Chairman of the Recovery Board, stated in a letter [2] to House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Darrel Issa, stated that he was not able to "certify that the number of jobs reported as created/saved on Recovery.gov is accurate and auditable." The statement came in response to a letter [3] Issa sent Devaney in advance of the Committee's stimulus oversight hearing on Nov. 19, a letter which asked Devaney if he was "able to certify personally" that the Recovery.gov number was accurate, and if not, if the Board would prominently display a warning on the site to that effect. Devaney's apparent disavowal of the jobs numbers became instant news, with Politico [4] and ABC News [5] jumping on it immediately, and Issa used the statement as evidence that the Administration could not validate the job numbers it has been citing over the past month.

The truth is, Devaney's comments are not news in any way. Devaney has often stated [6] that his job, and the Board's role, is not to fact check or validate the data collected from Recovery Act recipients, but to faithfully show the reported data, and that this means there will very likely be errors on Recovery.gov. Indeed, Devaney says as much in his letter to Issa, writing "I have repeatedly mentioned in the information I provide in the Chairman's Corner on the home page of Recovery.gov that there will be 'errors and omissions in some reports.'"

So if the substance of Devaney's statement isn't new, why is it news? Devaney's response, that he is not able to "certify" the jobs numbers, is technically correct, in that he is not able to since that is not his job. His job is to simply present the data that are submitted by Recovery Act fund recipients. But when outside observers, particularly those not familiar with the Board and its mission, hear that the person in charge with Recovery Act transparency is not able to validate the jobs numbers, it sounds like one of the Obama Administration's biggest recent talking points has been undermined by the government body that is the steward of the information upon which the Administration is basing its claims. And this is lamentable as the debate over Recovery Act jobs numbers is far more complicated than proving whether or not exactly 640,329 jobs have been created by the Act. Had Devaney responded that it is just not his job to certify the jobs numbers, and left it at that, the media would have been deprived of an easy, and misleading, soundbite.

This flap is unfortunate, since it distracts from the other question Issa asked Devaney in his letter, which was far more interesting. Issa asked if the Recovery Board has access to a master list of Recovery Act recipients, which the Board could use to figure out if any recipients failed to report as required by law. This has long been an issue about which we've been wondering. If the Board only has access to the recipient reports, how does it know if someone doesn't report?

Here's Devaney's response to the question, also from his letter [7] in reply to Issa:

I expect to have access to this data shortly. I have asked OMB [Office of Management and Budget] to work with the federal agencies responsible for making Recovery Act awards to develop a list of awards that were subject to the Section 1512 reporting requirements of the Recovery Act but were not reported in FederalReporting.gov during the first reporting cycle.

In other words, the Board does not have access to the list, and even worse, no one has had the foresight to create such a list and see if anyone hasn't reported in yet. It boggles my mind that this hasn't happened, and that we still, more than a month after the reporting period closed, have no idea how many recipients have not reported. That, in my opinion, is definitely newsworthy, but sadly, the issue is being overlooked for the far less newsworthy story about how Devaney won't validate the jobs numbers he isn't supposed to validate.