WASHINGTON — The chief auditor overseeing spending of the $787 billion in stimulus dollars said today that some fraud and waste is regrettably inevitable.
Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, told the House oversight committee that the challenge for his board is to “significantly minimize any such loss.”
Devaney warned that he thinks federal agencies will have great difficulty attracting and hiring enough contract professionals to minimize the risks associated with moving the money fast enough to accomplish the recovery act’s goals.
He says a government Web site on stimulus spending called Recovery.gov already is receiving 4,000 hits per second, and he wants it to foster historic levels of transparency.
But Rep. Edolphus “Ed” Towns, the committee chairman, said he thinks the Web site is not currently a usable database and he is planning to ask Vice President Joe Biden to convene a round-table to develop a uniform approach to track the money. Biden has been tasked by the president with overseeing the implementation of the stimulus.
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