Job count flawed in report on stimulus

A child care center in Florida said it saved 129 jobs with stimulus money. Instead, it gave pay raises to its existing employees.

Elsewhere, some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two, three, four, or even more times. The government has overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts under the president’s $787 billion recovery program, according to an Associated Press review of data released in the program’s first progress report.

The discrepancy raises questions about the reliability of a key benchmark the administration uses to gauge the success of the stimulus. The errors could be magnified tomorrow when a much larger round of reports is released. It is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing housing, building schools, repaving highways, and keeping teachers on payrolls.

The White House seized on an initial report from a government oversight board weeks ago that claimed federal contracts awarded to businesses under the recovery plan already had helped pay for more than 30,000 jobs. The administration said the number was evidence that the stimulus program had exceeded early expectations.

But the 30,000 figure is overstated by thousands - at the very least by nearly 5,000, based on AP’s limited review - because some federal agencies and recipients of the money provided incorrect job counts.

The White House says it is aware there are problems. Ed DeSeve, an Obama adviser helping to oversee the stimulus program, said agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. Other errors discovered by the public also will be corrected, he said.

There’s no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report.

DeSeve said federal officials had only a few days to go through the data for errors before they were made public.