After the Hearing: Notes on Stimulus Oversight

As I mentioned in my post yesterday [1], the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held its first stimulus oversight [2] hearing in months today, this one focused on reviewing the first round of recipient reporting under the Recovery Act. The hearing featured testimony from Earl Devaney, Chairman of the Recovery Board, Gene Dodaro, Acting Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office, and undersecretaries from the Departments of Education and Transportation. Here's a quick breakdown of the few news nuggets from Dodaro and Devaney in today's hearing:

Dodaro:

• The Office of Management and Budget estimates that at least 10% of recipients did not report during the first reporting cycle, which could potentially mean the job creation number is too low.
• The next GAO bi-monthly report will not be published until early December (not late November as initially expected).

Devaney:

• 20% of the original reports were modified by recipients during the error correction period.
• The Recovery Board will investigate using "logic-based" software on FederalReporting.gov [3] to prevent recipients from reporting nonsensical data (for instance, the software would prevent users from reporting that they had spent more Recovery Act funds than they had been awarded, or that they created 30,000 jobs with a $70,000 award).
• Thus far, the Board has spent a combined $9-$10 million on Recovery.gov [4] and FederalReporting.gov [3].

Of those five points, by far the most interesting is the first one, that at least 10% of recipients have yet to report on their use of Recovery Act funds. Expect to hear much more about this in the coming days.