Figures Lie and Liars Figurer.....

[chefdennis]

It seems no one knows how this siffer'en works...or how many jobs they, added, saved or created...i mean a job that a guy was called back to work after being off for 4 weeks lasted 166 HOURS and that counted .....rightttt. and just how much of the "Stimulus" money have they spent!?!?


Job-creation figures in doubt
Group questions accuracy of stimulus figures.

Chad Livengood
News-Leader
October 25, 2009
Job-creation figures in doubt | News-Leader.com | Springfield News-Leader

In mid-August, a seven-man team of divers from Kentucky spent four days retrieving a broken steel turbine blade from the bottom of Stockton Lake.

The Army Corps of Engineers paid the company, Mainstream Commercial Divers, $65,786 in federal economic recovery dollars for the project.

The diving company, which says it brought six full-time employees and one part-time worker to southwest Missouri and hired a local crane operator, reported on federal documents that the stimulus project created or saved 7.5 jobs.

When asked about that number, though, the watchdog group counting the jobs for President Obama said that not only does it appear the company incorrectly calculated the number of jobs created or saved, but that it doesn't know if most of the numbers reported so far are accurate.

In Missouri, approximately 475 jobs have been created or saved through federal contracts, at a cost of $53.9 million, federal data shows.

Eight months after Obama signed the $787 billion economic stimulus legislation into law, promising it would create or save 3.5 million jobs by 2011, the federal government is still trying to define what constitutes a new job.

Last week, the White House reported 30,833 jobs have been created through federal contracts. But a News-Leader inquiry of projects in southwest Missouri has found discrepancies in the federal data on Recovery.gov, the government's stimulus transparency Web site.

A spokesman at the White House's Office of Management and Budget said federal agencies have until Friday to identify errors in data for a quarterly report due out Saturday.

"The data that's out so far is very preliminary," OMB spokesman Tom Gavin told the News-Leader.

Gavin said the miscalculated job-creation numbers for the Stockton Lake diving project and others in southwest Missouri are "the kind of things the agencies are catching right now."

A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the agency was unaware of the problem until the News-Leader brought the matter to its attention.

A spokeswoman for the federal agency overseeing the stimulus says jobs created do not have to be permanent full-time jobs and that the data is based on self-reporting by contractors.

"This is the first time this has ever been tried," said Cheryl Arvidson, assistant communications director for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, a watchdog group set up by Obama to track stimulus spending.

U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt, a Springfield Republican who voted against the stimulus package, said the reporting snafu illustrates the problem of leaving the government in charge of creating jobs.

"We need to be working to create permanent jobs in the private sector instead of four-day jobs paid for by taxpayers," Blunt said of the Stockton Lake diving project.

In June, the federal Office of Management and Budget defined a job created as a "new position created and filled or an existing unfilled position that is filled as a result of the Recovery Act."

A job retained was defined in an OMB memo to federal agencies as "an existing position that would not have been continued to be filled were it not for Recovery Act funding."

Neither was the case for the diving company's employees and contracted worker, said Carlos Araya, general manager of Mainstream Commercial Divers, in Murray, Ky.

Araya said none of the employees who worked on the project were in danger of losing his or her job, and if they didn't get the Stockton Dam job they would have been somewhere else in the country on inland underwater diving missions.

"We were just there to recover the blade," Araya said.

Stimulus money or no stimulus, Blunt said the Army Corps would have hired the diving company because they needed to fix the turbine to resume generating power.

"A significant majority of the shovel-ready projects were going to be paid for in some other way; otherwise they wouldn't have been shovel ready," Blunt said.

Reporting problems

Federal contractors who created stimulus jobs before the end of September have until Friday to report any changes in how many jobs they created or saved with stimulus funds, Arvidson said.

"The agencies cannot change any of this data. It has to be the recipient," Arvidson said.

Arvidson said Mainstream Commercial Divers should have calculated the number of jobs created or saved based on the number of hours its employees spent on the job in relation to a normal 40-hour workweek -- not based on the number of employees on site.

"They may be confused about this. They may have misread it," Arvidson said of the guidelines. "I have no idea if it's accurate or not."

The federal government is relying heavily on contractors to follow "a complicated formula" based on a full-time equivalency to calculate a job created or saved in order to have an accurate reflection of the Recovery Act's impact on the national economy, Arvidson said.

The numbers are important because politicians, special interest groups and media organizations will use the data to make judgments about the stimulus program and whether it's helping pull the country out of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

Kirsten Kukowski, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, noted Missouri has lost 35,000 jobs since the stimulus legislation was enacted, "yet the Obama administration would rather cook the numbers than work to create meaningful jobs."

A News-Leader review of economic stimulus projects in southwest Missouri found other irregularities and confusion in the reporting.

Federal officials say it's likely there are other job creation/ retention errors across the country from the more than 100,000 recipients of direct federal contracts, which make up 5 percent of the entire stimulus package.

"Never before has the federal government asked its funding recipients to provide so much detail," said Gavin, the OMB spokesman.

In late August, the Army Corps of Engineers bought a conduit-bending machine to be used at Stockton Dam for $5,942 from the Bolivar branch of the industrial and construction supplies wholesaler Fastenal Co.

On its federal report, Fastenal said the transaction saved or created one job.

"I just figured it saved one person's job because at least one person had to operate it," said Andrew Lawman, a manager at the Fastenal store in Bolivar.

But Lawman said he interpreted the federal reporting document to mean it created a job for the end user at the Army Corps of Engineers, not Fastenal.

"I tried to muscle through it the best I could," Lawman said of the federal documents used to assess the stimulus' economic impact.

Fraction of a job saved

In Springfield this summer, the Department of Veterans Affairs hired a suburban Dallas-based construction contractor to tear out and replace a fence at Springfield National Cemetery, which the VA maintains.

FedAlliance LLC of Richland Hills, Texas, the primary contractor, hired Springfield-based Carnahan-White Fence Co. to remove the existing chain link fence and replace it with a new ornamental steel fence.

Carnahan-White, the subcontractor, did not report creating or saving any jobs, but was paid $55,295, federal records show.

FedAlliance, which gets preference for federal contract bids because it's a disabled veteran-owned business, reported being paid $5,987 and that the project helped save eight one-hundredth of a job -- 0.08 job.

Dave Coberly, project manager for FedAlliance who lives in Springfield, said it was his job that was saved for four weeks.

Coberly said he arrived at the 0.08 jobs saved figure by following federal guidelines that required him to calculate the numbers of hours the stimulus money paid toward his salary.

Coberly said he worked 166 hours, which amounted to eight one-hundredths of his work year.

Without the project, Coberly said he may have been without work for the four weeks.

"It did help me," he said.

"Helped us pay the bills"

The stimulus has helped others in southwest Missouri remain employed, a feat even critics like Blunt acknowledge.

Before the Democratic Congress passed the stimulus act, Willman Excavating & Construction Co. in Shell Knob was barely hanging on, according to owner Jack Willman Sr.

"This time last year, I didn't know how I was going to make my bills," Willman said.

Willman's company won a $344,136 contract to deliver and spread 20,000 tons of rock along 20 miles of back-country roads in the Ava and Cassville districts of Mark Twain National Forest.

Willman said the project lifted his son out of unemployment and kept the two of them and two truck drivers from Ozark employed for the month of March.

But on the federal reporting forms, Willman Excavating & Construction reported the project created or saved six jobs. Willman said he was unsure why his son wrote down six jobs, but noted the federal paperwork was confusing and onerous.

"I can't tell you how much paperwork we had to fill out just to get these (contracts)," Willman said.

The father-and-son company has since won contracts for other road improvement projects in rural southern Missouri and a retaining wall project at Wilson's Creek National Battlefield.

"The government throwing these jobs out there is a good deal," Willman said. "It helped us pay the bills."


Additional Facts
Stimulus money assists Greene County

Federal agencies report more than $40 million of economic stimulus money has flowed into Greene County since the program got under way in February.
It amounts to $151.08 for every man, woman and child in Greene County.
The majority of the money -- $16.2 million -- has flowed to students at local universities, colleges and trade schools in the form of Pell Grant payments that were lumped into the $787 billion stimulus spending bill.
Pell Grants were included in the stimulus as an increase in funding, which is normally done in annual appropriations bills. Under the stimulus legislation, the maximum grant increased by $500, from $4,840 to $5,350 annually.
"They would have been distributed in any case," said U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Springfield, who opposed the stimulus.
The next biggest chunk of the money is $14.8 million for improvements at Springfield-Branson National Airport, according to federal data obtained by USA Today.
In total, federal agencies report distributing $1.6 billion of the $4.1 billion in stimulus dollars obligated to help jump-start Missouri's economy.
Details about where money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is flowing are available online through interactive maps and charts at Recovery.gov.
But the most current federal figures do not include stimulus money that has flowed through the coffers of state government.
The state of Missouri recently turned in its first stimulus spending report, showing $1.1 billion has flowed through state agencies to recipients as of Wednesday, according to a News-Leader analysis of the data.
To search stimulus spending in Missouri, go to MAP Redirect and click on the "stimulus" tab. From there, you can search and track stimulus revenues, expenditures and individual programs.