United Liberty

We’ll be talking about this in Monday’s podcast, but the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has confirmed that the number of the jobs “created or saved” is inaccurate:

Administration reports that more than 640,000 jobs were created or saved by the government’s $787 billion stimulus program are inaccurate due to flawed reporting from recipients of the money, a report from the Government Accountability Office shows.

About 10% of those jobs – more than 58,000 – were  created as the result of projects that so far have reported spending no money, the GAO study issued on Thursday found. Another 10,000 projects that have spent a total of $965 million reported creating no jobs. As many as 10% of stimulus recipients did not report anything to the government’s Recovery Board, the agency created to track the money.

The faulty reporting was the subject of a hearing Thursday by the Senate Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, which has been investigating the use of the stimulus money.
[…]
Among the findings outlined in the GAO report or reported at the committee hearing Thursday or in the press are; reporting errors that included overstating the amount of money received, in one case by billions of dollars because of a misplaced decimal; reporting of hundreds of millions of stimulus dollars spent in Congressional Districts that don’t exist; and the reporting of the amount of money received in the “jobs created or saved” field.