Bulk of FederalReporting.gov funds go to IT help desk

The government has allotted most of the $19 million budget for FederalReporting.gov to the technology service desk that helps stimulus recipients file spending reports properly, not the actual information collection Web site.

There is a $6.8 million spending cap for FederalReporting.gov technology -- and a $12 million ceiling for help desk support, if all options under the three-year agreement are exercised.

Since Jan. 1, the help desk for FederalReporting.gov has fielded thousands of phone calls, e-mails and live chat inquiries from aid recipients pressed for time to report by Jan. 22. Updates on the status of economic recovery projects, money spent and jobs created were supposed to be in by Friday, Jan. 15, but the government extended the deadline because recipients were experiencing problems filing on time.

A change in the rules for calculating jobs and additional data entry steps have affected "recipients' ability to submit timely reports," Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery and Accountability Transparency Board, said in a Friday statement. The independent panel oversees stimulus spending and maintains FederalReporting.gov, as well as the public stimulus-tracking site Recovery.gov. New guidance on calculating jobs created by the stimulus plan was released two weeks before the start of the Jan. 1 reporting period. In addition, recent technical tweaks to FederalReporting.gov require some recipients to redo parts of their entries.

As of early Tuesday morning, personnel working at the FederalReporting help desk had received 15,606 phone calls; chatted online 4,966 times; and received 1,522 emails. For the same time frame during the first-ever reporting period in October, the numbers were higher. Through Oct. 18, 2009, the contact center received 18,192 calls, 4,632 chat requests and 2,670 e-mails.

It is possible there are fewer questions during this reporting period because users are growing accustomed to the process, said board spokesman Ed Pound. But he added there could be other reasons and the reporting has not yet ended.

States, contractors, nonprofits, universities and other recipients took time to grasp the reporting rules and FederalReporting.gov system during the first round of filing in October. They had to detail spending activities dating back to the February 2009 enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through Sept. 30. The initial deadline for recipients to report on grants, loans and nonfederal contracts was Oct. 10, but the government pushed back the due date by 10 days. Still, there were numerous high-profile errors when the data was posted Oct. 30 on Recovery.gov.

Recent changes to the data entry system aimed to address those mistakes. Many recipients typed in the wrong congressional districts, leading some Recovery.gov users to believe stimulus money had vanished into "phantom" districts. Now, the reporting site runs an internal algorithm that checks to make sure a recipient's district matches the ZIP code entered. If the two pieces of data don't match, the system will not accept the report until the recipient enters the correct district. The system now also scans to see if recipients report spending more money than they actually received, or report finishing a project without receiving any money yet. The site will prevent users from completing their reports until they enter the correct information.

Some of the most frequently asked questions by recipients on Tuesday included, 'How do I calculate jobs created?' and 'How do I use the copy forward button?' The latter is a tool that allows returning users to copy their entries from October 2009 into their January 2010 reports.

The help desk is open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, and was available on Saturday, Jan. 2, and Saturday, Jan. 9, from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m.

"We have a responsibility to make sure that we provide a very good service desk to the recipients who need help in filing these reports, so that we can provide the public with an accurate perception," Pound said.

Contractors CGI Federal and International Technology Experts are not using any new technologies to support the contact center, just good customer service practices, company officials said. "The one thing we are doing more of this reporting period is more proactive outreach to the large filers," such as state governments, "to see if they are having any challenges and working to support them," said Linda F. Odorisio, a CGI vice president.