When $200,000 becomes $200 million: The limits of federal spending data

Bulletin News Network of Reston, Va., characterizes itself as a "quiet leader in delivering customized business and political intelligence" to government and corporate clients. It provides news briefings for corporate leaders, association executives and government officials who are hungry to keep on top of the latest developments in their fields.

The company does a fairly nice business with Uncle Sam. In fiscal 2009, according to USASpending.gov, the official federal website for government procurement information, Bulletin News Network received $361,000 from the Office of the Secretary at the Homeland Security Department for "news clipping and briefing services."

Likewise, the State Department spent almost $305,000 on the company's services, and the Defense Department more than $250,000.

But in the USASpending database, those contracts and others from federal agencies are dwarfed by one from the FBI, for a whopping $216,324,400.

If that seems like an awful lot to pay for news summaries, there's an explanation: the figure is wrong. Somewhere along the data entry line, a few extra zeroes got added to the contract total.

Bulletin News Network officials said Tuesday the FBI contract actually was worth only a little more than $200,000. The company was unaware of the error until informed by Government Executive. GCE Inc., which operates the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation on behalf of the General Services Administration, also was informed of the error by Eagle Eye Publishers Inc., which processes procurement data for Government Executive's annual Top 200 Federal Contractors issue. GCE plans to correct the information in the database.

The FPDS-NG website shows both the $216,324,400 FBI contract, issued in September 2009, and a $216,108,075 de-obligation of funds ordered in March 2010. As of Tuesday, that de-obligation had yet to make it into the USASpending database.

It's difficult to determine just how common errors like this one creep into federal spending data. But it's likely they actually are less prevalent than in years past, when the largely paper-based procurement system offered multiple opportunities for mistakes to be made in the data entry process.