"Jobs count rules change"
By BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE, Associated Press Writer Brett J. Blackledge, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON – The White House has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama's economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money.
Despite mounting a vigorous defense of its earlier count of more than 640,000 jobs credited to the stimulus, even after numerous errors were identified, the Obama administration now is making it easier to give the stimulus credit for hiring. It's no longer about counting a job as saved or created; now it's a matter of counting jobs funded by the stimulus.
That means that any stimulus money used to cover payroll will be included in the jobs credited to the program, including pay raises for existing employees and pay for people who never were in jeopardy of losing their positions....
But the result of the new rules will be that future claims of job creation from the stimulus will be even more misleading, said Rep. Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
"It is troubling that the administration is changing the rules and further inflating the Recovery Act's impact and masking the failure of the stimulus to produce sustainable economic growth or real job creation," Issa said in a letter sent last week to the government board monitoring stimulus spending.
Recipients of recovery money no longer have to show that a job would have been lost without the stimulus help, and they no longer are required to keep an ongoing tally of jobs saved or created. The new rules allow stimulus recipients to limit the job tally to quarterly reports, making it impossible to avoid double-counting a job that was created in one quarter and continued into the next.
Issa wants the Recovery Board, the government's independent oversight panel, to change how it identifies the count of stimulus jobs and to add a note on its Recovery.gov Web site explaining that there is now a different definition for what constitutes a job under the stimulus.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100113/ap_on_bi_ge/us_stimulus_counting_jobs
No comments:
Post a Comment