States partner with White House to track stimulus spending

State technology chiefs are working with the Obama administration to ensure their computer systems and reporting practices can accurately track how federal stimulus funds are spent.

States are required to report how they plan to spend the billions of dollars the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has allotted them. But the biggest challenge will be answering how and where to send the spending data to federal agencies via the states' computer systems, said Doug Robinson, executive director of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers.

"The jury is still out on how this will work, because we don't have all of the details," he said. "Things are moving, but there are clearly going to be challenges and some initial risks associated with how states will absorb the reporting requirements that go up through multiple federal programmatic agencies."

The Office of Management and Budget released guidance to agency heads on Feb. 18 that detailed how recovery funds should be reported to the public. Recipients of discretionary funds from the economic stimulus package are required to report within 10 days to the federal agency that oversees its disbursement, how it plans to spend it, and details on any subcontracts or subgrants related to each project. States as well as city and county governments will receive a large percentage of the stimulus funds.

The Obama administration will use the information to populate Recovery.gov, the federal Web site the White House launched on Jan. 24, which will allow the public to track by geographic location how governments spend the stimulus funds.

The reporting process is a necessity, according to former OMB IT policy chief Bruce McConnell. "[Federal] agencies are unable in a systematic way to accurately report all that information, because their systems just don't have the capacity; things will fall between the cracks," he said. "By requiring recipients to report what they get, the loop is closed. The numbers won't reconcile unless by luck, but government has still doubled the accuracy of the data by getting the recipients to participate in real time."

OMB has negotiated with NASCIO for weeks to ensure the reporting requirement is not too heavy a burden on the states. Robinson said the issues have not involved data collection or the maintenance of computer systems, practices states have mastered.

States are more concerned about other possible trouble spots, such as sending data to one agency rather than numerous federal agencies. "We've urged OMB to have reporting go to a central agency at the state level, because as is, the routing is the problem," he said. "It has to be distinct and separate. Every agency [needs] different sets of data, so the state systems are going to have to be reprogrammed to a certain degree to accommodate that."

Asking states to route spending reports to numerous federal agencies will require manual processes. Submitting data to one agency in charge of collection would allow states to standardize how the information is reported, automating it as part of their accounting and procurement processes.

Robinson said he does not expect the White House to require states to feed information directly to Recovery.gov. States could use what he called a "pull architecture," which would allow the federal government to access the necessary data for the Web site directly from state computer systems. For example, Robinson said the searchable national sex offender Web site, which hosts the public sexual offender registries, operates under a pull architecture and is maintained by the Justice Department in cooperation with state agencies.

Teri Takai, CIO of California, said it is unclear how much states will have to change their business processes. "OMB appears to be asking for levels of detail that we do not have," she said. "It is too early to say for sure."

Takai and Robinson credited the Obama administration for including state and local governments in the discussion of how spending data would be reported. "We've been very impressed with how much [the administration] has reached out to state and local government to get input," Robinson said. "We've been consulted since early on in the transition period, which is clearly new. We were used to very little interaction with federal government."