Remember how Barack Obama and his hordes of aides descended on Washington, D.C. before he even took the oath of office and began making the push and the sell for a massive economic stimulus package? To the tune of $787 billion, they told the American people that it was necessary and vital to any economic recovery. They told us how it would preserve jobs and even how it would create new ones.

That has been about ten months ago and there has been more than one report on the effectiveness of the stimulus package.  One of the latest reports credits the recovery package with creating or saving 14,506 jobs with the spending from just one federal office, Health and Human Services. Sounds great, right? Well, as it turns out, no so much.

The Associated Press has been looking at the accuracy of some of these reports and it has found that the above number has been overstated by as much as two-thirds. The reason for this overstatement is the way these reports are playing fast and loose with the definition of some of the terms used in the reports. For instance, in the case mentioned above, federal officials instructed local officials to count pay raises as jobs saved. That’s right, they gave people raises and counted it as a job being saved.

“That’s more than ridiculous,” said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner.

Most of the inflated figures were like those cited in the 935 saved jobs reported by the Southwest Georgia Community Action in Moultrie, Ga. The agency, like hundreds of others collecting Head Start money, claimed all its existing employees’ jobs were saved because they received a pay raise with the stimulus cash.

Similar claims led to overstating by more than 9,300 the number of jobs saved with more than $323 million in stimulus money distributed by the Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, the AP’s review found.

More than 250 other community agencies in the U.S. similarly reported saving jobs when using the money to give pay raises, pay for training and continuing education, extend employee work hours or buy equipment, according to their spending reports.

The Georgia program inflated the numbers even further by claiming the recovery money saved more jobs than the number of people it actually employs. The agency employs 508 people but claimed 935 jobs were saved because of confusion over government reports.

For once, I would like a little honesty from Washington, but here is what Health and Human Services spokesman Luis Rosero had to say about the accounting practices.

If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job.

That is about as lame of an excuse for inaccurate reporting as I have ever heard. I don’t have a problem per say with giving people pay raises, although I do wonder why they didn’t try to create more jobs. I do believe the American taxpayers at least get an honest and accurate report of how our money is being spent.

There have been problems with the previous reports on the effect of the economic stimulus package, but President Obama assured us they would be corrected. That doesn’t appear to be the case with the latest report and I have to wonder this out loud. How long does he expect the American people to continue taking his word? I am afraid his promise of an open and transparent government continues to be ignored.

Tags: Economic Stimulus Package, Health and Human Services, Jobs, President Obama, The Associated Press

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 6:33 am and is filed under News/Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.