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By: FEDweek StaffEight years after enactment of the DATA Act requiring agencies to publicly report spending data on USAspending.gov, problems with the quality of that data remain, GAO has said in a blot posting.
GAO said that in a review of audits by IGs of 57 agencies, some $132 billion in spending in fiscal 2021—out of a total of $10.1 trillion—was not reported on the site and that it was not always clear how the rest was spent “or if the data displayed is accurate.”
“While most of the 57 agencies’ data were of higher or excellent quality, 8 agencies’ overall data quality levels were deemed “moderate” (meaning only some errors) and 4 were lower quality, according to their OIGs. That means some spending data for agencies, such as the Departments of Agriculture, Homeland Security, Labor, and the Federal Communications Commission were not very reliable,” said the GAO.
“Additionally, 31 agencies had issues with the quality of their COVID-19 spending data, according to their OIGs. For example, the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, as well as Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had incomplete, inaccurate, and untimely COVID-19 data. This means that we may never know how agencies spent portions of the trillions of dollars in COVID-19 funding,” it said.
All but three of the 57 IGs made recommendations for improvements including implementing processes to review data validation errors prior to submitting data to USAspending.gov, controls over data from award systems, and reporting of errors. However, the requirement for such IG reviews is now ended, the GAO added, recommending that Congress reinstate it.
In posting early this year, the GAO said that in discussions with researchers and others who use the site, some cited data errors and a lack of transparency about data issues that caused them to seek out “other data sources that they knew and trusted instead of USAspending.gov.”
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