Phantom ARRA Contractors

October 20, 2009

Much has been

said

about the glitches in the Recovery Act recipient reporting that began last week with federal contractors. For there to be glitches there has to be reporting, but what about those recipients that did not fulfill their reporting requirements?

To check for possible scofflaws, I compared the list of top ARRA contractors on the federal government’s

USA Spending

website with the

national spreadsheet

of recipient reports on Recovery.gov. Limiting the comparison to those companies (totaling 56) with at least $25 million or more in ARRA contracts according to USA Spending, a few contractors appear to be completely missing from the Recovery.gov list.

These include:

  • Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), which USA Spending says is receiving $1.3 billion in ARRA funds from the Energy Department. SRNS is

    owned

    by Fluor Daniel, Northrop Grumman and Honeywell, which do report on what appear to be separate smaller contracts.
  • Ford Motor, which according to USA Spending got ARRA contracts totaling $91.6 million to supply motor vehicles. General Motors and Chrysler got similar contracts and submitted reports.
  • Suulutaaq/Sloan Fencing JV, which according to USA Spending got a $53 million ARRA contract to supply fencing to the Army.

There are bound to be others in the rest of the long list of contractors.

To make things more confusing, there also appear to be ARRA contractors that are listed on Recovery.gov but missing from USA Spending. One example that surfaced is Innovative Technical Solutions Inc., which appears on the Recovery.gov spreadsheet with about a dozen contracts worth over $90 million, yet according to USA Spending it has received no ARRA contracts.

Apparently, we have a long way to go before we can even begin to accurately measure the impact of Recovery Act spending.

Reposted from the STAR Coalition

blog

.