Georgia jobs created by stimulus dollars overstated

Recipients of federal stimulus dollars have overstated the number of jobs created or saved in Georgia by more than 1,500, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of public records.

For example, several organizations that offer Head Start preschool programs and other services in Georgia reported retaining hundreds of jobs based on raises they gave their employees.

In one such case, the Central Savannah River Area Economic Opportunity Authority in Augusta reported saving 317 jobs. But that represents the number of Head Start workers who received 2.3 percent raises from the stimulus funds, said Chris Whitley, the authority’s fiscal officer. Whitley said the formula federal officials told him to use for calculating jobs is “convoluted.”

“I called Washington. And I talked to a young man up there and he seemed as confused as I was,” Whitley said, “but he was at the help desk. ... He said, ‘I would put the number of people who got the raise.’ And that is what I did.”

Like Whitley, many public agencies and private businesses say they are confused by the federal guidelines for calculating jobs that have been created or retained using stimulus money. Some who overstated jobs created their own formulas or listed jobs they expect to create but haven’t yet. Others said they simply got it wrong.

At issue is the federal government’s reporting of jobs created or preserved by the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The stimulus Web site, recovery.gov, says 24,681 jobs have been created or saved so far in Georgia, and 640,329 nationwide.

But an AJC examination of records posted on the Web site calls into question the accuracy of the numbers. The AJC found:

● An Augusta agency reported creating 68 jobs even though the work has not started yet.

● A private contractor counted the same 10 jobs six times, erroneously reporting 60.

● A Head Start organization in LaGrange reported 77 jobs based on raises it gave its employees with the money.

The AJC found the errors after downloading records from recovery.gov, examining those that reported the most jobs, and contacting recipients of the federal funds to verify their job numbers.

Federal agencies that award stimulus funds are required to review what recipients self-report before their information is posted, said Ed Pound, a spokesman for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which operates the Web site.

Recipients were given 10 days in October to correct any errors but some went uncorrected. Recipients won’t be allowed to make more corrections until January, when they are supposed to give updated reports, Pound said.

Federal officials have said since the jobs information was posted last month that they don’t believe it is 100 percent accurate. They said they released it to the public to make the spending as transparent as possible. They have asked the public to point out any errors and help police the spending.

“Changes are certain to include both upward and downward revisions, but we expect that the net effect on the totals will be modest,” said Elizabeth Oxhorn, a spokeswoman for the White House recovery office.

Critics are skeptical of the numbers.

“To say that 640,000 jobs have been created or saved just doesn’t quite jibe with the American people when they see a 10 percent unemployment rate,” said David Williams, vice president of policy for Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington-based watchdog group. “There is a fine line between information and propaganda.”

Job claims by several Head Start organizations provide an excellent illustration of the confusion surrounding the reporting.

Gloria Lewis, executive director of the Central Savannah River Area Economic Opportunity Authority, defended her agency’s report of 317 jobs, saying the raises her Head Start employees received will help persuade them to stay in their jobs.

“We are kind of in a Catch 22,” Lewis said. “We must make them qualified (workers), but then when we get them to that point we lose them because there is somebody else out there that is looking for a qualified person and who can pay them more than we can.”

But Community Action for Improvement in Augusta, which reported 77 retained jobs based on raises it gave its Head Start employees, did not offer such a defense for its report.

“That is an error,” said executive director Jerome Anderson. “We are going to basically correct our report.”

A Health and Human Services spokesman said last week his department is reviewing 8,000 jobs reported by recipients with Head Start programs. The department had told the recipients to use a formula that would count employee raises as a fraction of a saved job.

“HHS flagged all these reports and has been working with recipients to correct their reports,” Health and Human Services spokesman Luis Rosero said in an e-mail.

In other examples identified by the AJC:

● Augusta officials reported creating 68 jobs with federal stimulus projects tied to a $606,372 grant from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department. One problem: The workers have not started yet; 68 is actually a projection and should not have been reported to the federal government last month as jobs created or retained.

“I have to find out how to correct it,” Rose White, an assistant director of programs for housing and development for Augusta-Richmond County government, told the AJC in an e-mail.

● Los Angeles-based Syska Hennessy Group Construction reported 93 jobs stemming from an Army contract for work replacing storm and sewer lines at Fort Gordon near Augusta, but that is wrong. The number is closer to two jobs because the construction work has not started yet, said the company’s CEO, Bill Line.

● An Oklahoma-based joint venture that won six Army contracts for work in Georgia and North Carolina counted the same 10 jobs as being created or retained six times, resulting in 60 jobs. The venture also mistakenly listed one of its project sites — Fort Bragg, N.C. — as being located in Georgia. The company will correct the errors, said Marty Edwards, managing principal for the joint venture of White Hawk Group and Todd Construction.

“We shortchanged the North Carolina folks and made the Georgia politicians happy,” Edwards joked. “That will be a correction that will be made. I don’t know which mistakes I will make next quarter.”

The single largest misstatement of jobs created that has come to light so far in Georgia was reported by the Associated Press on Nov. 4. That report exposed how a Head Start organization in Moultrie reported stimulus spending had saved 935 of its jobs, though only 508 people work there. The Southwest Georgia Community Action Council issued a statement on its Web site this month, blaming the error on the omission of a decimal point. The number of jobs reported should have been 9.35, not 935, the statement says.

The statement does not say how the council came up with 9.35 jobs. But federal officials have told recipients to use counting methods that can result in fractions. For example, some recipients have been told to count raises given to employees as fractions of jobs.

“We regret this error and assure the public there was no effort made to deceive anyone,” the council’s statement says. “We will make every effort to ensure this error is corrected as the reporting process is cumulative and ongoing.”

Federal officials are advising some recipients of the money to calculate the jobs as “full-time equivalents” by taking the cumulative number of hours worked in jobs created or retained through stimulus projects for each quarter and dividing that by the hours they define as a full-time schedule. That’s why some organizations like the council in Moultrie report fractions of jobs created or saved.

The federal government’s top watchdog for stimulus spending acknowledged in an interview with the AJC this month that some recipients of the money are confused about how to calculate jobs.

“Clearly, recipients are not getting it,” said Earl Devaney, who was appointed by President Barack Obama to chair the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board.

Overstating jobs is not the only form of inaccurate reporting, the AJC’s review shows.

Some Georgia recipients reported creating no jobs after completing projects with hundreds of thousands of dollars in stimulus funds.

Statesboro-based Bethany Home Inc., for example, reported no jobs created or saved after renovating its nursing home in Millen with a $243,500 stimulus loan awarded by the U.S. Agriculture Department. But the nonprofit organization hired as many as 15 contractors to install doors, renovate the bathrooms and do other work as part of the project, said Becky Livingston, CEO of Bethany Home.

“In my opinion, the instructions were a little bit lacking in detail,” Livingston said. “I didn’t know if they wanted us to report permanent jobs or just temporary jobs.”

The federal guidelines indicate recipients should report both.

“There is overstatement. There is understatement,” said Michael Balsam of Onvia, a Seattle-based company that is tracking stimulus spending on its Web site, recovery.org (not to be confused with the federal site, recovery.gov).