Saturday, November 07, 2009
Last week, the Obama administration claimed that its economic recovery plan had created or saved 640,000 jobs. But what it didn’t highlight was that agencies were allowed to include a pay raise as a fraction of a job saved. If an agency or program gave employees a raise of 2%, that counted as 2% of a saved job. To put it another way, if 50 people were given a raise of 2%, that was the equivalent of saving one full job.
This proved confusing for some organizations. For example, Myrtis Mulkey-Ndawula, director of the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council in Moultrie, GA, said she did exactly what the federal government instructed after her organization received stimulus money. When filling out the required paperwork, she took the number of employees (508) and multiplied it by 1.84 (the percentage pay raise each received from the stimulus) and came up with 935. That number then became the new number of employees she had, on paper, which allowed the Obama administration to inflate statistics showing the impact of the stimulus plan. However, what she should have done was multiply by 0.0184 not 1.84.
This same misunderstanding or manipulation of numbers has happened elsewhere as a result of “reporting errors,” according to administration officials. One government agency, the Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, claimed to save more than 14,000 jobs, thanks to the stimulus. This figure, however, included 9,300 raises, not actual jobs.
An investigation by the Associated Press found more than 250 community agencies across the country reported saving jobs by including numbers for raises, training and continuing education, and buying equipment.
Administration officials have promised to fix the accounting problems found in stimulus reports.
-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky
Stimulus Watch: Salary Raise Counted as Saved Job (by Brett J. Blackledge and Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press)
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