As chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, Earl Devaney reports directly to the vice-president of the United States. He leads a group with the critical task of preventing and detecting waste fraud and mismanagement as well as promoting transparency in matters pertaining to stimulus dollars. The Board itself is made up of a dozen federal Inspectors General.

Devaney has worked in the public sector for 42 years. Several days ago, we had a conversation with him about the twin missions of the Recovery Board and the lessons learned since the Recovery Act was launched in February 2009. [Photo of Earl Devaney at left, courtesy of David Kidd, Governing]

Q. What was the biggest challenge confronting the Board when it was first established?

Devaney: The challenge wasn’t money. We had plenty of money and the best IT people. The challenge was to put together the most transparent website ever created in government and to do it in the time frame we had – starting from scratch. We had to build two websites, one to collect information and the other to display it and we had to be able to display spending to the American public on October 30^th, 2009.

What would normally take two years was done in six months.

We also had to concern ourselves with the accountability piece on the largest chunk of money that IGs have ever seen assembled in one place. The enormity of this task was daunting as we looked at it in early 2009.

Q. In what way has the emphasis on transparency helped keep stimulus dollars from being misused?

Devaney:  It turns out that if you have transparency . . . you have less fraud than you normally would. I’m knocking on wood here, but the dire predictions have turned out to be wrong. . . We have a website where millions of people can go and see what’s spent in their own neighborhood. We have reporters getting up every morning to look for the $900 hammer stories.

It’s like having a house in a neighborhood with lights and barbed wire and a sign that says ‘Mad Dog Inside’. Would you rob that house or go down the street? There were so many eyeballs on this money that it deterred bad guys from coming around. If I was going to steal money, I wouldn’t steal this money.

All of that is to say that transparency is the friend of the enforcer and the enemy of the fraudster. Transparency and accountability go hand in glove. You put the two things together and you have a much better strategy for protecting the money.

Q. Can you point to any particularly useful strategy for detecting fraud?

Devaney: We started the Recovery Operations Center.  When I was the inspector general for the Interior, we had information in thousands of different locations. But here we have a giant database of contracts and grants all in one place. We use software tools and human analysts in a way that had been used to hunt down terrorists.  It means you can prevent fraud from happening – as opposed to the old paradigm that you come in after the fact. We are able to interrupt fraud or stop fraud before it happens in the first place.

Q. Can you give us an idea of how much the public is going to be reading about fraud in coming months?

Devaney: We have over 575 investigations in progress in the IG community at the federal level and undoubtedly some of those cases will involve a lot of money and some will result in arrests. You’re going to start to see fraud cases emerge, but it’s fair to say that the professionals in the field have been surprised at how little has occurred so far. If you were to look at the amount of money associated with cases charged with crimes, it’s miniscule. We’ve been pleased about that.

Q. The GAO has reported that the data reported on Recovery.gov has become more accurate. What are some of the improvements you’ve put in place?

Devaney:  We’ve designed systems to stop people from making mistakes. We developed a whole bunch of different logic checks. In the beginning, we had the problem of people entering phony or nonexistent congressional districts. The simple solution was to tie congressional districts to zip codes. [If the two didn’t match, the system wouldn’t accept the information.] As soon as we did that, people stopped making that mistake.

We’ve seen fewer and fewer mistakes and less of a need to interact with our help desk people. People like this system. It has a lot of integrity to it and we can audit the system. You can make a change and I could tell you six years from now when it was changed, how it was changed and who changed it. Most data collection systems can’t do that.