The Energy Department’s inspector general criticized a Michigan nonprofit on Monday for running afoul of stimulus job reporting requirements by only reporting jobs that were created with stimulus money.
The official data reporting policy of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly known as the stimulus, requires that recipients include jobs that existed prior to stimulus funding in its tally of jobs "created or saved" by the measure.
The policy has come under fire from critics who say it artificially inflates the stimulus’s impact on job creation.
The Southwest Michigan Community Action Agency (the agency), which received $6.69 million in stimulus funds for weatherization projects, reported the number of jobs it created using those funds to the state Department of Human Services, which oversaw weatherization efforts.
The failure to note the number of jobs saved violated stimulus job reporting requirements, according to a recent report from the Energy Department’s inspector general (IG).
Stimulus regulations require recipients to include existing employees who worked on stimulus-funded projects in its jobs data, the IG said. The agency only counted new hires toward that number.
"Southwest did not report any work hours for its existing positions funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act)," the report notes.
"Instead, Southwest reported hours only for new positions created as a result of funding by the Recovery Act."
Stimulus jobs data measures hours worked, not employees hired, under projects funded by the measure. Hours are then averaged to come up with a total jobs number.
The metric is designed to include jobs that existed prior to the stimulus, but worked on projects funded by it.
Critics of the measure say that that metric exaggerates the Recovery Act’s simulative impact.
The administration’s means of measuring stimulus employment "counts every job that is funded using stimulus money—even if it existed before the Recovery Act, and was not in any danger of being eliminated—as ‘created or saved,’" wrote Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, when the administration rolled out its new data reporting requirements in 2010.
"This definition ignores the plain meanings of the words ‘created’ and ‘saved’ and makes Recovery.gov’s ‘ ‘jobs created/saved’ label a falsehood, further eroding the confidence of the American people in their government," Issa wrote.
Some say DOE’s recent IG report demonstrates why the administration’s chosen metrics are misleading.
"The agency is correct, the administration is not," said Seton Motley, president of Less Government. "It is this new mathspeak that leads to the woefully skewed jobs numbers we get out of DC."
Motley said the administration’s jobs metrics are designed to obscure the stimulus’ poor performance on that front.
"Stimulus proponents originally said its $1+ trillion would create jobs," he told the Washington Free Beacon in an email. "When that demonstrable untruth became widely known, they shifted to [this] absurd calculation."
Academic examinations of stimulus spending and resulting job creation have found that employees hired with stimulus money mostly came from other organizations, meaning the hiring had a negligible impact on national employment.
The agency did not respond to a request for comment.