More than 4,300 recipients of one or more federal stimulus fund awards have not reported how much money they received and what they are doing with it as required by law, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Those missing reports are preventing the public from getting a complete picture of how taxpayer money from the $787 billion program is being spent and how many jobs it is saving or creating.
Frustrated federal officials, meanwhile, are considering penalties for the lawbreakers. Among the options is cutting off the money.
Recipients were supposed to send detailed quarterly reports to the federal government last month under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Those reports require dozens of pieces of information, including descriptions of their projects, how much money they have spent and the number of jobs that have saved or created. Congress made the reporting requirement law to keep the taxpayer spending transparent to the public.
An OMB spokesman told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that reports are missing for about 10 percent of the total number of stimulus grants, loans and awards. He could not say immediately what that percentage represents in stimulus dollars.
Information on the Web site recovery.gov says 130,362 such reports have been filed. To date, $158.7 billion in stimulus funds has been awarded.
On Dec. 4, the AJC formally requested -- under the Freedom of Information act -- the list of recipients who have not filed the required reports. OMB has not released a list to the AJC. But federal officials say they plan to publish one on recovery.gov in the coming days, possibly early next week. They say they hope that will prompt people to get their reports in.
It's unclear what the impact will be on jobs totals for Georgia and across the country.
Meanwhile, at least one government watchdog is asking why OMB waited until the end of November to direct federal agencies to track down people who did not file the required reports. In a memo dated Nov. 30 -- more than a month after first reports were due -- OMB Director Peter Orszag told federal agencies to compile lists of “non-compliant recipients” by Dec. 4.
“It’s a really great idea and I don’t understand why they didn’t have that from day one,” said Craig Jennings, a senior policy analyst for the Washington-based OMB Watch, a government watchdog group that is part of the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery. “I don’t think it’s a terribly complicated thing to do.”
Federal officials said they are working to improve a system that already has made an unprecedented amount of information available to the public on recovery.gov.
“The October reporting period was a very compressed period of public reporting,” said OMB spokesman Tom Gavin. “So things were done very quickly and as effectively and efficiently as the system allowed at the time. And now we are working to improve the system.”
The Recovery Act does not include penalties for failure to file reports. But the federal government’s point person for ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse in the spending said there should be consequences.
“Perhaps an agency could refuse to provide any additional funds to a noncompliant recipient or demand that noncompliant recipients return funds not yet spent,” Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last month.
Vice President Joe Biden has called the missing reports unacceptable. And Orszag, the White House budget director, has told federal agencies that recipients who are persistently late or negligent in reporting could be cut off from funding.
But not everyone whose report is delinquent is ignoring the law.
Propublica.org, for example, exposed this week how a report for the North Georgia city of Blue Ridge is not on recovery.gov as it should be. The city received a $12.9 million federal stimulus loan to improve and expand its drinking water system. The work is already under way, but it has not created or saved any jobs at this point, according to city clerk April Grizzell.
Grizzell said she tried several times to file her city’s report in October as required, but a federal Web site kept kicking it back. She said she later realized she had not registered some information about her city on another federal Web site as required prior to trying to file the city's report. By that time, the reporting deadline had passed and the federal system site had locked her out, Grizzell said.
Grizzell said: “It wasn’t from lack of trying.”
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