It certainly looks like our Government is at work as usual, in not telling the truth... How much of Recovery.org can we believe? This was on ABC Prime Time News tonight with Charlie Gibson, and this is the 2nd night running... They sure do go through a lot of trouble trying to give us some great information... I wonder where the real money went?

http://watchdog.org/2009/...es-to-phantom-districts/

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist.

According to data retrieved from recovery.gov, nearly $6.4 billion was used to "create or save" just under 30,000 jobs in these phantom congressional districts-almost $225,000 per job. The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress-which, for the record, counts 435 members-in early 2009.

The site's monitors, however, are not too savvy about America's political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

The stimulus revived 8 recently retired congressional districts. Pennsylvania's 21st District has received just under $2 million in funds. Mississippi's 5th District and Oklahoma's 6th received $1 million from the legislation, respectively. All three were eliminated by the 2000 census.

Many other recipients carried the banner for congressional districts that have been defunct for decades. South Carolina's 7th took the cake, garnering more than $27 million in stimulus funds, despite being eliminated in 1930. And Virginia's 12th District may have been written off at the start of the Civil War, but it must carry some sentimental value in Old Dominion-it received more than $2 million, according to recovery.gov.

The stimulus helped to create 35 congressional districts in Washington D.C. and the four American territories, all of which have no congressional districts. These areas received $5 of the $6.4 billion distributed to the non-existent districts.

New Mexico Watchdog broke the story on Monday morning after finding that $26 million in stimulus money had been distributed to 13 congressional districts-ten more than the state actually has. Similar reports soon followed from New Hampshire, Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota and West Virginia.

A reporter from the Montana Policy Institue confronted the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees the site, about these non-existent congressional districts on Monday afternoon. Ed Pound, Director of Communications for the board, said that the faulty information came from recipients of stimulus funds.

The integrity of the data, however, has also come under scrutiny several times in the past month. Numerous media studies have revealed a reporting system riddled with errors and results that are "impossible" to calculate, such as the number of jobs "saved" by the bill.

Vice President Joe Biden admitted that the administration's statistics were flawed after an Associated Press study revealed several instances of exaggerated and outright false job creation. The vice president acknowledged that "further updates and corrections are going to be needed."

The administration may have begun to do just that. 60,000 jobs were cut from original stimulus estimates on Monday, citing faulty data.

Pound says that the board plans on correcting the site's other reporting errors during the next data collection cycle, which is set for January.

The full data from the Franklin Center study can be found below or by clicking here. All information was pulled directly from recovery.gov

The explanation sounds reasonable, as people make mistakes filling out forms all the time. This is really not anything to rant and rave or even foam at the mouth about.

Gop
Just keep in mind that they have only announced part of the mistakes, at least this is what ABC said... Also remember that all of the networks put it out so it must be important news... This is a copy of my answer to you from another Board as follows...

You do know that they have Computers, but I am not sure if they have good programmers when they make errors like this... This is unbelievable... You don't need more folks to check the accuracy, when you can let the Computers do the walking through all of the data to insure that you don't make such a dumb mistake...

They are trying make available as much data as they can, as quickly as they can. So they are going ahead and entering the data as it is presented to them. Let's be realistic here - The reporting mechanisms were designed by Democrats working for the government. There's no hope for achieving accuracy.

The bottom line is they are going to work on correcting the errors. The information they are trying to report is nebulous, at best. The number of jobs "created or saved" is a phantom number that has no verifiability. It's simply a PR number, and the less time spent gnshing teeth over its accuracy, the better.

I am not going to completely answer your post, since you don't seem to be concerned about the inaccuracies... I was wondering how much these errors will cost us overtime? Especially since no one really seems to know...

Given that the web site's budget is $84 million, I think they already budgetted for an extravagent amount of overtime.

Gop

I do think that they stole that money in a way... I would love to see the Program that they are using, especially in the Validity area of it, if they had one... LOL

Their software is just fine, reporting exactly what the recipients filed in their forms.
Civics lessons however might be in order, especially in those mostly republican controlled districts, where the recipients couldn't even state their correct district #.
Just look up South Carolina's detailed page
http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/StateSummaries/Pages/statesummary.aspx?StateCode=SC and you will notice that there is no 7th district listed.

Jabra
I would not bet on the software being good at all, since over the years, I see so few folks that really knows how to write the type of software needed... If it is the folks fault that is inputting it, then if the software doesn't catch it. then we call it GIGO Garbage in Garbage Out...

So you want the government to somehow alter the raw data a handful of republican recipients erroneously entered on their reporting forms?
How do you know that their software didn't raise a flag?
Did your source tell you that although some recipients entered the wrong district # the rest of the data like name and address and everything else was correct?
Does that make you suspicious that the corrected data doesn't show any non-existing districts?

I really miss the good ole days when nearly $9 billion were lost over 2 years and was barely mentioned.
Nearly $9 billion of money spent on Iraqi reconstruction is unaccounted for because of inefficiencies and bad management, according to a watchdog report published Sunday. An inspector general's report said the U.S.-led administration that ran Iraq until June 2004 is unable to account for the funds.

Jabra

I don't know the answers to your question for a fact, but I do know that if the software is done right, then there had to be many flags raised, but I haven't heard about it... There should be no excuse for errors of the sort originally posted... In regards to non existing districts, again the Validity checking portion of the Program should have check to see if the Districts were correct as well as other Validity checks to catch many other problems that arise...

In your last article, Watchdog reporting is only as good as the folks running the outfit along with the workers... Of course you need great software to track this kind of reporting...With today's education, I won't put much faith in the folks running it...

not to piss on this OP, but $6.4B is not very much money when we have a $600 TRILLION derivatives mess.

I will be watching for updates on this to see if indeed the problem(s) gets fixed.

macro
I agree, but all of the head News agencies are calling a lot of attention to it... I also think that if you can nip all the problems in the bud now then we can save a whole lot more in the long run... Or do we wait until we really get nailed, then search for the problems? Your a good business person macro, would you let this go and fester?

i would if i were more worried about the $600T.

but that is not a direct answer. the direct answer would be i would worry.

macro

LOL but in regards to the $600 Trillion Mess, this is most serious, but I expected this to be already raising a lot of Hell with the economy, but it has been silent for quite sometime, and it sure bothers me, that this problem has not surfaced as yet... I wonder how it is being covered up, Possibly like Bernie covered up his mess that he left...

WWII, have you checked with recovery.gov if any of the claims stated in the OP are even true?

I locked up that claim of the 99th district of North Dakota. On recovery.gov it says

00 congressional district	1,292.6	$697,155,103

Nothing about a 99th district.

Pennsylvania's 21st District has received just under $2 million in funds
That 21st District doesn't show up on recovery.gov

Mississippi's 5th District and Oklahoma's 6th received $1 million from the legislation, respectively
Nope. Not a 5th district under Mississippi, not a 6th under Oklahoma either.

South Carolina's 7th took the cake, garnering more than $27 million in stimulus funds
No 7th district listed at recovery.gov.

I'll stop now since I'm sure we all can recognize a pattern here.
Have you checked what those "missing districts" are based on? A document compiled by some guy named BMCMORRIS? Who is this guy?

Data can be corrected, so the fact that the districts you noted aren't showing up in the reporting now doesn't mean that they didn't show up before.

But all of this is inconsequential, as incorrectly entered CD numbers aren't important. People make mistakes on details such as that all the time, and it really doesn't make any difference which Congressional Districts the money is spent in anyway.

There's a waste of money here in trying to break down the information to too minute a level. The only reason they are trying to assign a number of jobs "created or saved" is to give the administration some kind of a number to wave around. The important information here is what projects are funded, and the amount of funding for each project.

Jabra

I find these messages on this OP to be quite fascinating, since they really get my attention... Now to trying to answer your questions the best I can...
I took the word of the Nightly news Charlie Gibson, and when using Google I seen many statements about this problem, therefore, I can't really go into it issue by issue, since this is really the Computers job... When the Computer does Comparisons as you know it is first written in the programs all of the valid Districts Numbers as well as the person identified with the particular District to insure validity of the district and the person associated with it, along with some kind of of a Security coded signature...
Jabra, you did go into it very well and I haven't, but as you say, there is definately a pattern of mistakes, that should not be taking place... I agree with your assessment, and it is telling me that no one really knows how bad this system really is, and it needs to be corrected, if possible...

Consider the people actually entering the data are probably just minimum-wage employees doing nothing but data entry all day, I can't say I'm shocked that there are going to be mistakes. And, you wouldn't want a database changing entries for you. If someone can read through and find the errors, they can fix them once they verify the source is what they think it is. This really seems like much ado about nothing. Surely the media could have found a real story to report on.

I believe the data was entered on-line by the people who are handling the projects at the state or agency level, so it's not like they all filled out forms and then shipped them to Washington to have them entered. But it's really a non-issue, as the errors can be corrected. And some of the projects, I'm sure, cross CD lines anyway, so how does that get recorded and how does that change what's reported?

They could have reduced the scope of what they were capturing and probably saved a portion of the $84 million budget for the web site.

For that amount of money, the web site should be producing gold bricks to be handed out like candy by the directors of the board of recovery.org.

Maybe the creation of the web site is the first step in the Obama full employment program...

I took the word of the Nightly news Charlie Gibson, and when using Google I seen many statements about this problem,

What exactly is the problem, WWII?
The way I see it in this case is that some dude named BMCMORRIS, whoever that is, uploaded a document to docstoc.com, an online community. His second document btw, and incidentally both documents are about some phantom districts.
Another dude picked it up and posted it on his website, two more dudes picked it up from there for their websites and on and on it goes. A few days later Google shows 17,986,000 matching search results and Charlie Gibson and the rest of the solutionless and agenda-driven recovery act haters are on the ball to dazzle the like-minded with meaningless nonsense as in the OP. Where was this Gibson guy and BMCMORRIS when the billions really disappeared during Bush/Cheney's Iraqi Recovery Act?
As Gopqed stated, there are surely many grants given to recipients spread out over several districts. "00 District" sounds fair to me to cover such cases.
Quick question, WWII. Without googling, which CD are you in?

Of course you need great software to track this kind of reporting...With today's education, I won't put much faith in the folks running it...

Honestly now, WWII. Where you one of those great mainframe software guys who decided to use only 2 digits for the year to save a few bucks?

Jabra

I am going to answer this one first since it is funnier... LOL Yes, I started off with Military and Commericial Main frames, and we didn't have the memory that the Computers has in your homes... As a matter of fact, I wote Banking programs in Machine Language... I also used COBOL, but since I knew the Computers very well I use to write a lot of Programs in Machine Language and I could write it probably faster then most folks can using COBOL, and use 1/4 of the memory that COBOL takes up... LOL

Incidentally I started off with Computers using only Vacumn Tubes in 1955... I have worked on many Computers for the Military a well as Commercial... I was also in Charge of Debugging the IILLIAC Super Computer and we were working on it one Quadrant at a time for a 64 bit Quadrant and we would wind up with 256 bits... This computer was used to forecast the weather, since with the old ones they used, about the time that they told us we was going to get whatever, we already had it... This is the first Computer that the College Kids in Chicago struck against, thinking it was a War weapon...

I could dazzle you with a complete bookkeeping program written by me in BASIC and fully functioning with a total ram of 48Kb
I should still have my Sinclair micro drives and a few of those micro tapes with my own programs laying around....

Hey WWII, just don't miss my smilies in my posts, will ya!