Zip Code, Reporting Errors Found on Nevada Pages of Stimulus Website

(Phillip Moyer/Nevada News Bureau) – More errors have been discovered at recovery.gov, the $18 million government website that tracks spending for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

In addition to previously-discovered reports of spending in Nevada congressional districts that do not exist, including $7.7 million reportedly sent to Nevada’s 9th, 22nd, 25th, and 32nd congressional districts, new findings show errors in the website’s breakdown of the state’s funding by zip code.

Included on the Nevada page are three jobs and $960,000 in funding attributed to 39701, a Columbus, MS zip code, along with nine jobs and $754,400 in funding attributed to the Kingston, NY zip code 12401.

These errors exist despite measures previously taken to weed out erroneous data, such as allowing recipients to correct their submitted data at any time, and an internal logic check that ensures the congressional districts reported by the recipients match the reported zip code.

However, no nonexistent zip codes were reported for Nevada’s page, unlike other states such as Colorado, West Virginia, Washington, Ohio and California.

According to watchdog.org, Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board spokesman Ed Pound dismissed the recent findings as “much ado about nothing” saying, “This is simply human error. Just because recipients inverted zip codes does not mean that the money is going to some phantom place.”

Inconsistencies were also found between the data reported on recovery.gov’s state summary pages and the information on the site’s data map. Nevada’s state summary page, for example, reports that the state received $5.4 million less in funding than the information on the data map indicates.