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GAO: Federal government's online spending portal hampered by inconsistencies
A new report from the Government Accountability Office casts doubt on the effectiveness of the federal government's online spending portal, USAspending.gov.
The site -- commissioned in 2006 to track federal agencies' contracts, loans, grants and other financial awards -- remains hampered by reporting mistakes, data inconsistencies and a handful of other errors and missed benchmarks, the GAO found in its study, released on Friday.
But the GAO still stressed the site's overall ability to promote transparency and openness "will be limited in providing the public with a view into the details of federal spending" for as long as the agency's concerns remain unaddressed.
Most notably, the GAO discovered a sizable collection of inconsistencies between the USAspending.gov's spending information and the annual reports the agencies themselves have on file.
Of the 100 awards GAO examined as part of its review, all of them contained at least one oversight -- from a missing value in a report's field, to a number that conflicted with an agency's self-reported spending total, to a confusing or otherwise inadequate spending data point.Most commonly, "The data fields with the most errors or omissions included a title descriptive of the award’s purpose and the city where work funded by the award was performed," the GAO found.
However, GAO officials stressed many of those errors had to do with the source of the reported data, which was sometimes incomplete or insufficient for the website's managers to report federal spending completely and accurately.
Still, federal investigators stressed those periodic errors spelled early trouble for a website that was envisioned as a way for the public to hold agencies accountable for their spending.
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