By Political Reporter Marshall Zelinger
m.zelinger@krdo.com
Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mzelinger
COLORADO SPRINGS – Your federal tax dollars are being spent in parts of Colorado that don’t even exist. According to the federal economic stimulus website, recovery money has been awarded to recipients in 17 different Colorado Congressional Districts. Colorado only has seven Congressional Districts.
"There’s no mystery about what happened here. Some of the recipients of the recovery act funds entered incorrect Congressional Districts in their reward reports,” said Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board Director of Communications Ed Pound. “We at the recovery board, our technical team, is doing an analysis of what we can do to correct these problems.”
The problems are greater than Colorado. More than 700 phantom Congressional Districts exist on the federal database. More than 130,000 stimulus grants are listed on the website.
"Some of the mistakes are frustrating typos and coding errors that don’t undermine information at the heart of the data,” said G. Edward DeSeve, Special Advisor to the President, Assistant to the Vice President and Special Advisor to the OMB Director for Implementation of the Recovery Act. “Yes, it is ‘silly’ that Recovery.gov shows that a project went to the 15th Congressional District in Arizona – when there is no such district. But a ‘click’ on the project details gives you the address, and a check on the address shows it is in Arizona’s 3rd district. All this shows is that when people send in 130,000 reports, some will have silly mistakes. But it doesn’t really undermine the ability of the public to track and follow the data – or the fact that real jobs have been created.”
NEWSCHANNEL 13 cross-checked the recipients of money in phantom Congressional Districts with the Colorado recovery database and found that they are legitimate recipients of stimulus money.
Click here to see excel file with the recipients of taxpayer money in phantom Colorado Congressional Districts.
“There’s no phantom money here, this money went to recipients, it’s clearly shown,” said Pound. “This is really just human error, there’s nothing nefarious here, there’s no mystery. People entered incorrect Congressional District on their award reports.”
“We have worked hard to make the information as correct and up to date as possible,” said Colorado Economic Recovery Act Communications Manager Myung Oak Kim. “The accounting mechanism does need to be improved somewhat, but overall the numbers are solid.”
The state’s economic recovery website is compiled using information provided by state agencies that distribute the stimulus money in Colorado. The federal site starts with federal reports, which then are separated by state.
“We’re talking about 130,000 files, each file having up to 99 data elements, so we’re talking about just a massive amount of information that was hand-submitted by all of the recipients,” said Kim. “What we have found is that there are a small number of files that have some issues with them, and so we’re following up.”
According to Kim, a small staff compiles the state database.
“There are grants that are announced every week and some of the amounts change because projects bid out, and sometimes they come in a little higher or lower, and so it’s a very arduous process, but it’s important to us to get it right and we’re working hard at it, but we’re also not trying to spend a lot of money on administration. We don’t have an office full of people doing this,” said Kim.
“This is part of the deal you make when you’re transparent. There are a lot of good things about transparency, and that’s letting the public know precisely where its money is going,” said Pound. “We said from the beginning, before we ever posted any of this stimulus data, that recipients would make errors in their reports.
NEWSCHANNEL 13 also found at least three zip codes input incorrectly for Colorado recipients.
“People are going to put in the wrong number, wrong award amount, they’re going to put in the wrong street address, it could be any number of things,” said Pound. “People have to fill out these data reports, and there’s many, many elements in there, dozens of elements, and they have to fill out these data reports, and they’re going to make errors.”
NEWSCHANNEL 13 asked Pound why the recipients would be awarded the money if the contract or grant forms were filled out incorrectly.
“It’s up to the federal agencies that disperse the money, that’s where this question should be addressed,” said Pound. “We don’t certify everything on the website that comes from recipients as accurate, there’s no way we could do this.”
