Vice President Biden recently penned an op-ed entitled "What you might not know about the recovery" in which he explained the process of the stimulus spending and the efforts undertaken by the Administration to promote both job creation and transparency. The website Recovery.Gov, managed by the Obama Administration, continues to improve and provide an audit-worthy window on where hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funds have been spent.
An alternative stimulus tracking website, Recovery.Org, was launched by my company in March to provide real-time data at the state and local level about where stimulus contracting opportunities exist for small and medium-sized businesses. While there have been numerous comparisons made between it and Recovery.Gov, I do not see the sites as competitors. Rather, I believe that they compliment one another in a public-private synergy that is working to achieve the goals of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA).
Congress passed the Recovery Act to create and save jobs, jump-start our economy, and lay the foundation for long-term economic growth. There is no question that it has helped to pull our nation back from the precipice of economic calamity that we faced earlier this year, but many companies are still struggling and the job sector is still in trouble.
But while Recovery.Gov is showing where federal funds have been spent, it has the burden of maintaining a paper trail that will stand up to a government audit. Furthermore, it is not yet tracking the state and local level contracts, where much of the job creation will take place. The "flywheel effect" of job creation from the Recovery spending will happen principally in local communities, according to economists, and Recovery.Org was intentionally built to provide visibility into the government procurement process for business owners and their employees.
While Recovery.Gov excels at looking at stimulus spending from the top-down, Recovery.Org tracks government spending from the bottom-up. The platform that we have built over the past decade captures and standardizes contracting opportunities issued at the state, regional, and local level. This is no small feat considering that amongst the tens of thousands of government agencies at all levels, there is a vast amount of unstructured data, as each entity has its own set of rules, and each issues its own RFPs, Invitations to Bid, project amendments, and contract award information about contractor and subcontractor recipients of Recovery funds.
What Recovery.Org can offer is a current, coherent, searchable, and useful view of this complex information. In fact, to-date, Onvia has tracked information for over 3,611 Recovery-funded projects that have been awarded, valued at over $14.7 billion.
The other key to the recovery is the accountability and transparency called for in the ARRA. The distinguished Chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, Earl Devaney, has stated that the purpose of the Recovery.Gov site is to foster historic levels of transparency of Recovery Act funds, and to minimize fraud, waste, or mismanagement.
Mr. Devaney has estimated that $55 billion of taxpayer dollars may be lost to fraud. That's five times the entire GDP of Afghanistan and about the same as the GDP of Vietnam, Luxembourg, and Ecuador.
Recovery.Gov will have data on recovery funds -- eventually. States that receive recovery funds directly from the Federal government are responsible for reporting to the issuing agency, which in turn is responsible for reporting periodically to Congress and quarterly to the Recovery.Gov website.
While the thoroughness of this reporting will make the data on Recovery.Gov bulletproof in terms of its accuracy, it also means that the data could be 100 days old before it's publicly available. This is good for auditors, but does not provide the real-time transparency that is an effective deterrent to fraud, waste and mismanagement.
At Recovery.Org, the projects are posted in near real-time, allowing citizens and businesses to have immediate access to information about Recovery-funded projects. The data comes directly from the state and local government agencies who will be reporting that information to Recovery.Gov months later.
This cradle-to-grave visibility, from the bottom up, empowers citizens to know what is happening in their communities and to be the whistle-blowers on potential waste, fraud and mismanagement before it happens.
Recovery.Org fully supports the important goals that have been outlined for our nation's economic recovery. By approaching the stimulus funding from the perspective of small and medium-sized businesses, Recovery.Org has created a private-public synergy that is serving businesses and the public in their efforts to create jobs and expedite the recovery.