Not Complete Until The Paperwork Is Done

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has decided to go after parties that received stimulus funds but have not filed the necessary reports back to the federal government that details how the money was spent. However in typical government fashion, at least some of the missing reports are as a result of the bureaucratic red tape inherent in the system that they set up.

Propublica.org, for example, exposed this week how a report for the North Georgia city of Blue Ridge [GA] is not on recovery.gov as it should be. The city received a $12.9 million federal stimulus loan to improve and expand its drinking water system. The work is already under way, but it has not created or saved any jobs at this point, according to city clerk April Grizzell.

Grizzell said she tried several times to file her city’s report in October as required, but a federal Web site kept kicking it back. She said she later realized she had not registered some information about her city on another federal Web site as required prior to trying to file the city's report. By that time, the reporting deadline had passed and the federal system site had locked her out, Grizzell said.

Grizzell said: “It wasn’t from lack of trying.”

I am naturally suspicious of any organization which incorporates the dot org tag in their title since 9 times out of 10 they tend to be the domain of liberal progressives. They have really taken ownership of that particular label so I decided to look up the group in question and found this.

ProPublica is a team of journalists – the largest investigative staff in the nation – who produce the kind of hard-hitting and high-impact journalism that’s falling by the industry’s wayside.

I was actually kind of surprised that they actually do decent reporting and from what I could browse through, no I didn't take an in depth analysis of all of their stories, they appear to be very straight forward. They mostly link to other news agencies and their reporting and limit the amount of commentary.

The whole point though is just like several car dealerships had problems trying to enter information during the "cash for clunkers" program we have yet another example of how the federal government can't seem to get out of their own way.

Yeah I really want them running my healthcare.