Stimulus reporting registration off to a smooth start

Nearly 3,000 recipients of Recovery Act funding have signed up for FederalReporting.gov, a Web site that will collect governmentwide data on stimulus spending.

The first two days of registration for prime recipients, subrecipients and federal agencies were free of major hiccups, according to Ed Pound, a spokesman for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which runs the Web site. "This is a good start," he said. "We did not have any glitches so we know it's working right."

Enrollment, which began on Monday, is the initial reporting step for state and local governments, contractors, universities, nonprofits and other organizations that have received stimulus grants, contracts or loans of more than $25,000. As of early Tuesday afternoon, 2,900 funding recipients completed a one-time registration with the password-protected site, Pound said.

FederalReporting.gov is modeled after an open source approach developed by the CGI Group, a Fairfax, Va., information technology services company, and used by the Environmental Protection Agency's Central Data Exchange to collect environmental information from states.

To build and manage FederalReporting.gov, the board issued a task order off an existing, competitively awarded EPA contract to CGI. The Recovery contract pays the firm $9.2 million in fiscal 2009 and another $9.7 million through the end of fiscal 2011, Pound said. A significant portion of those costs, he said, cover site maintenance and staffing for a help desk to assist registrants.

While board officials have suggested that using the site is no more difficult than shopping online, assistance is available through a toll-free support desk at 877-508-7386, by e-mail at support@FederalReporting.gov, or via a live chat on the site's home page. The support desk currently is available from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, but will operate around the clock during the initial reporting period in early October.

To sign up for FederalReporting.gov, registrants first must obtain a DUNS business identification number. Grant and loan recipients also must sign up with the government's Central Contractor Registration database before filing a spending report.

On Aug. 13, the General Services Administration awarded a $2.7 million sole-source task order to Dun and Bradstreet to support the data collection process and publication requirements. The fixed-price award was issued off an existing GSA multiple awards schedule contract, the notice stated.

The announcement said competition was restricted because "only one source is capable of responding due to the unique specialized nature of the work."

GSA did not respond to a request for comment about the task order.

Recipients must enroll at FederalReporting.gov before submitting spending reports -- due between Oct. 1 and Oct. 10 -- detailing almost 100 data elements, including how much money they have received, the amount they have spent so far, the timetable and scope of their projects, and the number of jobs created. Quarterly status reports will follow the first reports. Recipients can use a standardized XML or Microsoft Excel templates to fill out the reports.

The recipient data will be publicly available beginning on Oct. 11 at the revamped Recovery.gov Web site. The data will feed into maps, charts, downloadable data sets and other interactive features, according to the board.

The 28 federal agencies that have disbursed stimulus funds also must sign up at FederalReporting.gov to review information recipients submitted and discuss with them any errors or corrections. While the award agency can view the information, only recipients will be able to change the data once it is submitted, and only for a short period after the Oct. 10 reporting deadline.

The board will monitor any changes made to spending reports once they are submitted. Software will be applied to track and graph what changes are being made, in which categories and by whom.

The board expects 150,000 to 200,000 recipients to file reports by the Oct. 10 deadline. But Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney acknowledged during a recent interview with Government Executive that those figures are only a rough estimate.