Empty Promises? Recovery Chairman Says "Stimulus" Reporting Will Improve

Tuesday, December 15, 2009 12:47 PM by Mattie Duppler

Today, the Chairman of the Recovery Transparency and Accountability Board which oversees Recovery.gov, posted a statement on the website outlining how the government hopes to improve upon its reporting of "stimulus" jobs across the country. These guidelines include the prolific idea of using logic-based software to check recipients' reports and technology that would "flag" reports that state their funding was larger than what they actually received. These common-sense approaches that apparently weren't deemed essential for the first launch of data will be available for taxpayers to view in the form of a big, new, sparkly map.

We've blogged before on our disastisfaction with the site - it cost taxpayers' an outlandish sum while providing little insight into how their money was being spent on "stimulus" projects. Throw in the astounding errors we've been tracking coupled with the administration's confession that basic safeguards weren't in place when they published the data and we're fairly reluctant to see how much the portal will be improved by these latest revelations. We are glad that Chairman Devaney recognizes the portal's inefficacies and is at least trying to improve on the site...now if only the administration would admit defeat in their mystical "jobs saved/created" metric.We could have saved a lot of taxpayer dollars if the White House hadn't been so keen on supplying fancy graphics to support their myth of "stimulus" job creation.

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