Looks as if WH Administration is padding the job numbers?

The Government Accountability Office report on stimulus fund tracking was released in Congress on November 19, 2009. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10223.pdf . The report states;
"As of September 30, 2009, approximately $173 billion of the $787 billion—or about 22 percent—of the total funds provided by the Recovery Act had been paid out by the federal government .....Nonfederal recipients of Recovery Act-funded grants, contracts, and loans are required to submit reports .....Of the $173 billion in funds paid out, about $47 billion—a little more than 25 percent—is covered by this recipient report requirement. Neither individuals nor recipients receiving funds through entitlement programs, such as Medicaid, or through tax programs are required to report ....the required reports cover direct jobs created or retained as a result of Recovery Act funding .....On October 30, www.recovery.gov (the federal Web site on Recovery Act spending) reported that more than 100,000 recipients reported hundreds of thousands of jobs created or retained ....."

I periodically have studied the tracker on Recovery. gov to see if the what the White House Administration was publically stating was as transparent, and as true, as had been promised all those months ago on the campaign trail. If you studied very much of it, you would come across entries that had jobs created or retained, but there was no money given to them. There was also money given to agents but no jobs listed as created or retained.

My son is the math wiz in the family, but it seemed to me that if you get at least a hundred million dollars, there should be at least a few jobs showing up somewhere. I think the people that put together the GAO report saw the same things I did. They included in the report:

"Erroneous or questionable data entries that merit further review:
• 3,978 reports that showed no dollar amount received or expended but included more than 50,000 jobs created or retained;
• 9,247 reports that showed no jobs but included expended amounts approaching $1 billion, and
• Instances of other reporting anomalies such as discrepancies between award amounts and the amounts reported as received which, although relatively small in number, indicate problematic issues in the reporting."

On the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, (http://www.publicintegrity.org/ ), a watchdog site, there were a number of instances shown to go a bit beyond being tagged as a "discrepancy". In virtually all 50 states, claims were made on behalf of congressional districts that don't exist. The 'errors' counted up as nearly $6.4 billion for nearly 30,000 jobs in 440 non-existing districts (http://www.wgal.com/news/21670147/detail.html). I wonder how many in the Government Accountability Office stayed up late for the last few nights reworking the report after this info started to hit the news media?

If you want to study a more accurate accounting of where the money has gone to, then study the stimulus tracker on MSNBC page.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33498869/#/all/all/us/all/

On the MSNBC tracker site is a statement:
"Data for the tracker, provided by Onvia, a company that tracks government contracting activity, differs from federal government data". Onvia has a site for tracking the money on http://www.recovery.org/ . That's Recovery dot ORG; not Recovery dot GOV .
Maybe this is the agency the government should use to get a true read on where the money went? ..... Wait a minute - that would mean there would be someone really making them honestly account for al those dollars the taxpayers have to shell out.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-11-19-stimulus-jobs_N.htm
------------------------------------