WASHINGTON (AP) —
President Barack Obama's economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at
the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success
story for the stimulus plan. Trouble is, only 508 people work there.
The
Georgia nonprofit's inflated job count is among persisting errors in
the government's latest effort to measure the effect of the $787
billion stimulus plan despite White House promises last week that the
new data would undergo an "extensive review" to root out errors
discovered in an earlier report.
About two-thirds of the 14,506
jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration
for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually
weren't saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The
Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300
existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay
raises and benefits and whose jobs weren't saved.
That type of
accounting was found in an earlier AP review of stimulus jobs, which
the Obama administration said was misleading because most of the
government's job-counting errors were being fixed in the new data.
The
administration now acknowledges overcounting in the new numbers for the
HHS program. Elizabeth Oxhorn, a spokeswoman for the White House
recovery office, said the Obama administration was reviewing the Head
Start data "to determine how and if it will be counted."
But officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.
"If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job," HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.
The
latest stimulus report, released Friday, significantly overstates the
number of jobs spared with money from programs serving families and
children, mostly the Head Start preschool program. The report shows
hundreds of the programs used nearly $323 million to provide pay raises
and other benefits to their existing employees.
The raises
themselves were appropriate — the stimulus law set aside money for Head
Start salary increases — but converting that number into jobs proved
difficult. The Obama administration told Head Start officials to
consider a fraction of each employee as a job saved.
"That's more than ridiculous," said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner.
Many Head Start programs around the country went further, counting everyone who received a raise as a job saved.
"It's
a glitch in the system," said Ben Allen, the research director at the
National Head Start Association. "There was some misunderstanding among
some in the Head Start community about completing the reporting
requirements."
Allen said a cost-of-living adjustment "may not be
viewed traditionally as a job saved, but one could interpret it that,
by providing COLA, you're retaining staff."
The Bergen County
Community Action Program in Hackensack, N.J., noted the nearly $213,000
it received went to cover raises for existing staff only, but it also
reported saving 85 jobs.
At Southwest Georgia Community Action
Council in Moultrie, Ga., director Myrtis Mulkey-Ndawula said she
followed the guidelines the Obama administration provided. She said she
multiplied the 508 employees by 1.84 — the percentage pay raise they
received — and came up with 935 jobs saved.
"I would say it's confusing at best," she said. "But we followed the instructions we were given."
Ed
DeSeve, who oversees the stimulus at the White House, said the Head
Start numbers "represent a few percent of all jobs reported" and said
the problems would probably be balanced out by other errors that
underreported jobs.
"So we don't expect any corrections to this data to meaningfully impact the total 640,000 direct jobs," DeSeve said.
More
than 250 other community agencies in the U.S. similarly reported saving
jobs when using the money to give pay raises, to pay for training and
continuing education, to extend employee work hours or to buy
equipment, according to their spending reports.
Other agencies didn't count the raises as jobs saved, reporting zero jobs.
Last
week's stimulus report claimed 640,000 jobs saved or created by the
economic recovery plan so far. Those jobs came from 156,614 federal
contracts, grants and loans awarded to more than 62,000 recipients,
worth a total of $215 billion.
Obama has promised the stimulus
would save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year, and the
data released Friday represented the first head count toward that goal.