The Wall Street Journal reports:
The government agency charged with overseeing the economic-stimulus program says it has no plans to change its claim that the package directly created or saved 640,329.17 jobs through September, despite its own admission and statements from the White House that the number is not accurate.
Ed Pound, spokesman for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said that it will not revise the number of jobs posted on its Web site, www.recovery.gov, which is based on quarterly forms filed by tens of thousands of recipients of stimulus money detailing how they spent the money and how many jobs it created or saved. The first forms were filed and released to the public in October.
The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, issued a report last week saying that there were "significant issues to be addressed" in the accuracy of the recipients' forms.
The report said that "many entries merit further attention," noting confusion among recipients about how to count the number of full-time equivalent jobs they had created or saved, as well as more basic problems filling in the dozens of entries on the forms.