Chairman Devaney: embarrassment will lead to Recovery.gov improvements

A quick search using Google News finds nearly 18,000 stories in on the web about "stimulus data." Good, bad or indifferent, the work of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, along with its website Recovery.gov, is getting noticed.

Chairman of the board, Earl Devaney, told FederalNewsRadio that's exactly what was hoped for in releasing the data detailing how and where stimulus dollars were being spent.

The information reported by recipients, said Devaney, "certainly didn't surprise me. Particularly the mistakes."

In fact, Devaney called them "serendipitous in a way" for two reasons: the process wasn't slowed down to a crawl while fixing them, and they may inspire a better performance next time.

What we're all seeing, at least following the first reporting period, is not particularly pretty. This data may cause some embarrassments for some agencies and some recipients, but I believe in the long run the embarrassment will encourage self-correcting behavior and make it better in the future.

Of the more than 131,000 recipient data reports received, Devaney said that about 21% were changed over a 19-day period where recipients and agencies could review the data together.

Asked if he worries that recipients may know they have submitted incorrect information (about job creation or the like), Devaney said "I worry about a lot of things (laughs.)" He said he worries about "data that's wrong," he hopes that agencies get better at policing the data, and that he's worried about "people who may have received recipient money and who didn't report at all. Sort of non-compliers, if you will."

As for other instances of waste, fraud or abuse, Devaney told the Federal Drive the bright red bar at the top of each of the pages on Recovery.gov has yielded some good results.

"We've got people calling, we have a hotline set up where people can either call in, or they can e-mail us... they can fax it to us and we'll take pony express if that's the way they want to send it in."

Devaney said he's confident they can handle the amount of complaints.

Going forward, Devaney said he thinks "with this money, agencies are going to have to maybe change their paradigm a little bit and actually get into the business of knowing what the states do with the money."

All in all, Devaney is heartened by the process, warts and all.

This data in the past would have been scrubbed for months... Then it would have been housed in 23 or 24 or in this case 28 agencies and the public never would have seen it. So this is transformational. We're putting the information up, relatively speaking, in its raw form. I think part of the transparency lesson is that embarrassment will drive self-correcting behavior, and transparency drives accountability. This kind of transparency is going to give us IGs a heck of a step up when it comes to finding out things we probably never would have inside the Beltway.

In an interview last month on FederalNewsRadio, Devaney said he expects Recovery.gov's method of data reporting to become the way the government reports spending in the future.