OMB POLICY STATEMENTS
OMB Issues Recovery Act Guidance
Office of Management and Budget has put out a new Recovery Act Guidance, this one specifically addressing job creation estimates and data quality issues. With the new guidance, OMB is hoping to head off some of these stories for the coming reporting cycle. The Guidance lays out ways in which agencies can help recipients report better data. Agencies now are supposed to highlight for recipients data elements that have been shown to have significant errors, such as recipient name, award amount, and job creation estimates, with the hope that recipients will pay more attention to these sections when entering their data. The agencies also are instructed to have recipients examine their reports for logical inconsistencies, such as if a recipient reports having created a large number of jobs despite not yet starting a project.