Data starts flowing in from recipients of Recovery Act funds

Stimulus fund recipients appear to be complying with requirements to report their spending activities online.

As of Wednesday recipients had submitted 112,000 spending reports to the federal government's data collection Web site, according to the board monitoring stimulus spending. In August, the Office of Management and Budget anticipated that about 150,000 entities receiving grants, contracts and loans under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would use the FederalReporting.gov site during the first round of reporting. But some users submitted multiple reports because they received more than one contract award and some state governments filed information on behalf of some recipients, meaning the number of reports does not match the number of users.

The number of users is expected to grow as more awards are disbursed under programs still in the planning stages, such as renewable energy initiatives. Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said in an interview that as many as 1 million users might file by the end of the recovery effort.

The first wave of report information will be published Thursday on Recovery.gov, the public stimulus-tracking site, followed by a bigger batch of data on Oct. 30.

Thursday's release will cover close to 9,000 recipients awarded contracts directly through the federal government, according to the board. Grants and loan data from states, nonprofits, universities and companies will appear on Oct. 30.

"The recovery board built FederalReporting.gov to receive the recipient reports and Recovery.gov to post them for public viewing in a remarkable time frame of only a few months," Devaney said in a statement. "I'm very pleased to say that the collection of this data went very smoothly."