Asking hundreds of thousands of private companies, research organizations, universities and governmental entities to provide jobs data was bound to create countless headaches. So, it  shouldn't have been a shock that the first recipient reports,  required from those who receive Recovery Act funding, were loaded with data problems, including incorrect zip codes, non-existent Congressional districts and missing information.  The press was full of stories about all these issues.

As Earl Devaney, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board chairman said to CNN back in January. "Every speech I gave, every comment I made, to any press person, I told them I expected to have data quality issues, and then when we had data quality issues, everybody acted surprised. That surprised me a little bit, that people were shocked and awed by the fact that American citizens, when they filed the reports, made mistakes. It didn't surprise me at all.”

As we've mentioned previously, recent reports from the U.S. Government Accountability Office have had largely positive comments about improvements in the data. These conclusions are further supported by the most recent quarterly report from the RAT Board.

But the same press corps that was only to happy to report about the flaws seems to be snoozing through the good news stories, focusing instead on partisan bickering about whether the Act did or didn't live up to its promise.

A chart of the Recovery Board's own "Key Reporting Indicators" shows that the number of recipient reports filed increased by 37 percent between the first and third quarters of stimulus activity, but indications of data problems declined fairly dramatically. (Note: the first quarter report actually covered a far greater time span than a quarter: February 17 to September 2009; the third quarter covered January 1 to March 31, 2010)

• The total number of stimulus recipients who didn’t provide the required reports  dropped from 4,259 in the first quarter to 755 in the third quarter.
• In the first quarter, 25.5% of the reports had to be changed after they were originally submitted; In the third quarter, 7.6% required changes.
• In the first quarter, it took the Recovery Board help desk nearly 13 minutes to answer phone calls. In the third quarter, help desk response time was less than a minute. Meanwhile contacts with the board have dropped from nearly 34,000 to 20,350.

Anyone who works with government data knows that there will continue to be data quality issues that need to be worked out, but the improvement should be encouraging -- particularly to the increasing numbers of people who regard the Recovery Act transparency requirements as a model for future federal programs.

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