Mashups Finger Stimulus Fishiness

A federal mashup tool has generated tips for investigations into stimulus fraud and fingered ineligible people who are receiving funds, the independent watchdog overseeing stimulus spending told lawmakers on Thursday.

The newly purchased system uses "the vast amount of public information -- more than 8.5 million public records and growing -- about companies receiving Recovery Act funds" to "identify non-obvious relationships between entities," Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, testified at a House committee hearing.

The ability to mash up -- or extract and compare -- records "has resulted in leads for investigations and for audits, identified added risk factors and pointed to excluded parties receiving Recovery Act funds," he added.

Before the government purchased the platform in October, there was no central system that federal inspectors could use to spot repeat instances of fund mismanagement. A vendor could win a contract from one agency while being blacklisted by another.

Now, Devaney said, the relationships detected by the system will reveal facts that may not have been known at the time of contract or grant award.