| Today's Feature Flu Vaccine for
All.
The Jasper County Health
Department has announced that the H1N1 vaccine is
now available to anyone ages 6 months of age and
above. People no longer have to be in a priority
group.
There will be a clinic on
Tuesday, December 15 from 9 to 11 a.m. and 1 to 4
p.m. at the Jasper County Health Department, 105
Lincoln, Carthage
This clinic is by appointment
only. There is no cost for the vaccination.
Those children under 10 years
of age that have received one dose of the vaccine
should receive a second dose as long as it has
been 28 days from the first dose. Both types of
H1N1 vaccine will be available (injection or
nasal mist).
The Department says it got in a
"nice big shipment" of the vaccine and
will administer to anyone that makes an
appointment. This clinic is not limited to Jasper
County residents.
Call if there are questions or
to schedule an appointment: 417-358-3111.
McCune Brooks will have the
vaccine available from 7 to 9 a.m. also on
Tuesday. No appointment necessary, $10 admin fee.
Thousands of
Stimulus Reports Missing, Resulting in Potential
Undercount of Jobs Created
by Michael Grabell, ProPublica
An $8 million federal stimulus
contract to repair Glacier Point Road in Yosemite
National Park is among thousands that didn’t
have the required reports filed. Photo by
Leonardo Pallotta.
Eagle Peak Rock and Paving
created and saved 32 jobs thanks to an $8 million
federal stimulus contract to repair Glacier Point
Road in Yosemite National Park.
But you won’t find that on
Recovery.gov, the government’s Web site for
tracking stimulus money.
You also won’t find the
eight employees hired by Owensboro-Daviess County
Regional Airport in Kentucky, or the 46 jobs
claimed for some $65 million in grants awarded to
the Louisiana Department of Social Services.
The three are among thousands
of recipients who didn’t file the required
reports detailing what they did with stimulus
money and how many people they hired or retained.
With mounting criticism over
the accuracy of jobs numbers, the White House
budget office is scrambling to identify
recipients who didn’t report. Vice President
Joe Biden said last week that the missing
information is unacceptable. And the
government’s stimulus watchdog, Earl
Devaney, who oversees Recovery.gov, promised to
post a list of non-filers in an effort to
embarrass them into complying.
The stimulus act provided no
explicit consequences for those who didn’t
report, though agencies can cut off recipients
from future federal funding. Devaney has called
on Congress to add penalties, such as fines.
The missing reports stand to
add thousands of jobs to the current tally of
640,000 created or saved by the stimulus.
Tracking down the missing reports is also
critical for the Obama administration to meet its
pledge of unprecedented transparency with
stimulus money.
In an effort to show the public
how taxpayer dollars are spent, Congress required
all recipients of stimulus money – including
contractors, local governments and nonprofits
– to file quarterly progress reports on a
government Web site. The reports must contain
about 100 pieces of information, including how
the recipients have spent the money, how many
jobs – and what types – they have
created or saved, and how far along the project
is.
The first report was due Oct.
20. After the deadline, recipients are locked out
of the system and can no longer file reports or
make changes until the next reporting period, in
January.
To find out who didn’t
comply, we compared the reports on Recovery.gov
with all the contracts, grants and loans that
federal agencies have previously said were paid
for with stimulus money. Even after eliminating
common mistakes, such as different names or
amounts, more than 2,500 recipients appear to
have never sent in their required reports,
accounting for at least $2 billion in unreported
stimulus money.
The White House budget office
said the number of missing reports could be even
higher. It estimated that recipients have failed
to file up to 10 percent of the reports on
Recovery.gov. Currently, the site lists 131,000
reports and $159 billion in overall stimulus
spending.
"If there are thousands of
people who haven’t filed reports, that sheds
some doubt on the total," said John Irons of
the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think
tank focused on labor issues. "There are
people who are trying to throw mud on the whole
thing. This would add fuel to that fire."
Several stimulus recipients
– including Eagle Peak, the Owensboro
airport and Louisiana social services – said
they tried to file but were beset by technical
glitches. They told similar stories about having
trouble uploading the report, trying to resolve
the issues with government agencies and then
being locked out of the system when the deadline
passed.
"The first time we
submitted the report, there were some missing
boxes and it got sent back," said Kareen
Duvall of Las Vegas Paving Corp. "When I
went back to make corrections and resubmit
through the federal Web site, it wouldn’t
let me submit. The time had expired."
But the government watchdog
that runs Recovery.gov, officially named the
Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board,
isn’t sympathetic to people who had
technical problems. Spokesman Ed Pound said
federal agencies hosted numerous Web seminars
leading up to the deadline. The board extended
the deadline by 10 days and had 60 people
answering technical questions by phone and
Internet chat.
"You have to take the time
and follow the instructions to do it," Pound
said. "I don’t think that’s asking
too much of people when they’re receiving
hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from
the federal government."
Devaney, the oversight
board’s chairman, told us he plans to use
the bully pulpit of the Recovery.gov Web site to
shame non-filers.
"Every opportunity I have
to embarrass somebody for not reporting, I’m
going to take advantage of that," he said.
Recipients who didn’t
report range from agencies as large as the
Louisiana Department of Social Services, with a
$1.2 billion annual budget, to tiny Blue Ridge,
Ga., tucked into the Chattahoochee National
Forest, with just six employees at city hall.
Trey Williams, spokesman for
Louisiana social services, said the agency
realized it had a problem with its contractor
registration number back in August and tried for
months to resolve the issue with the Recovery
Board help desk, the White House and the IRS.
"When we couldn’t
file the report by the deadline, we went ahead
and submitted the report via hard copy, and were
told it had to be submitted online and could not
be submitted again until it opened again for the
next reporting period," in January, he said.
Blue Ridge’s city clerk,
April Grizzell, said she filed the city’s
report on $12.9 million in loans to increase
rural water service. But the computer system
bounced it back while she was out with swine flu,
and by the time she returned, it was too late.
Recovery.gov is also missing
reports from the entire government of American
Samoa, which received a blanket waiver from the
White House after a tsunami struck the island two
days before reporting started. Pat Galea’i,
American Samoa’s stimulus czar, said the
island has created or saved hundreds of jobs.
While recipients reached by
ProPublica say they didn’t intentionally
skip filing, the Recovery Board is on the lookout
for signs of people who may be hiding something.
Bob Whitmer, the director of
the Owensboro airport, said he was very concerned
about missing the deadline because of the
airport’s previous problems with the federal
government. It has been cited for poor
administration of grant funds in 10 of the past
11 annual audits, according to a report this
summer by the U.S. Department of
Transportation’s internal watchdog. But
Whitmer said he, too, had computer problems, and
the help desk never responded to an e-mail.
"There was a lot of effort
there," he said. "We were trying to
make sure we did this right and got our
information in on time."
In addition to technical
problems, there also seems to be some confusion
about when the reporting requirement kicks in.
Many contractors told ProPublica that they
didn’t file the reports because they
hadn’t received any money yet and work
hadn’t begun.
For contractors, a signed
contract doesn’t necessarily signify the
start of the project, said Mark Weisensee of the
James W. Fowler Co., which is building a $16
million fish hatchery for an Indian tribe in
Washington state. The company still has to
finalize plans and go back to the agency for
approval to actually begin work. And competing
bidders have a window to protest the contract and
put the job on hold, which is what happened with
the fish hatchery.
But the White House budget
office said recipients are required to file as
soon as the contract is signed.
Still, the federal government
should do more to help contractors with the
reporting process, said Ken Worthan of Eagle Peak
Rock and Paving, the contractor on the Yosemite
road project.
He said he went online to fill
out his report but it kept bouncing back with
errors. After calling to resolve those problems,
he filed the report and got a confirmation that
it had been accepted. But he then needed a code
to upload it. He said he requested one but never
got it.
"We’re trying to
report the information they requested as best as
we can," Worthan said. But "if
they’re not getting the information,
it’s not going to be real accurate.
They’re not going to be able to sit in front
of everybody and say, ´Well, this is how many
jobs we created.´
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