GAO finds more glitches in stimulus spending reporting process

With the April reporting deadline just a few weeks away, federal auditors have found technical glitches with the process that stimulus recipients use to report spending and job creation statistics.

On April 1, organizations that have received money from the 2009 economic stimulus package will begin filing details on the status of their projects for the period covering January through March. They have 10 days to finish filing, and shortly after, their updates will be fed into the public stimulus-tracking site Recovery.gov.

A March 3 Government Accountability Office report found that the process has improved since the first reporting phase in January, when some recipients entered congressional districts that did not exist, prompting some Recovery.gov users to think taxpayer money had disappeared into phantom districts.

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board solved the problem by implementing automatic checks that use internal algorithms to flag discrepancies between ZIP codes and districts. Recipients cannot transmit their reports through FederalReporting.gov, the password-protected site for spending updates, until the two correspond.

But additional technical problems have surfaced, according to GAO. Now the system has discrepancies between ZIP codes listed in the multiple federal databases that recipients use to enter project location information.

FederalReporting.gov was programmed using the U.S. Postal Service's database of ZIP codes and congressional districts. But some ZIP codes in the database do not match the congressional district in which they actually are located. "According to the board, the USPS acknowledged that some districts' ZIP codes matches to the correct congressional district were still being corrected and resolved," GAO stated.

The board has contacted the Postal Service to express concerns about the geographic areas in question, board spokesman Ed Pound said. The Postal Service "is reviewing the information provided to determine the correct course of action it might need to take," he said. "The board is hoping it is completed before the April reporting cycle."

GAO also identified a mismatch between districts and the ZIP codes that recipients had entered into the Central Contractor Registration, the primary procurement registration database for the federal government. The system collects and shares data on organizations involved in most agency acquisitions, and all prime recipients must be registered in the CCR database.

"According to the board, many recipients found that they had errors in the ZIP codes in their CCR registration," GAO officials said. "When recipients tried to enter their congressional districts, if they did not match the ZIP codes they had entered in CCR, they failed this edit check."

Pound said recipients can access their CCR records by themselves at any time and change the ZIP code listed to one that corresponds to the appropriate district. "They do not have to wait for the next reporting cycle to begin" to fix the ZIP code, he added.

Users are responsible for checking their CCR information, Pound said, adding FederalReporting.gov instructs users to correct their records if they believe the information is incorrect.