A federal stimulus program to employ low-income youth created just 124 jobs, state auditors say, cautioning against the measures used by the Capital Area Workforce Development Board, which said it put 681 people to work.
The directors of a $2.3 million stimulus-funded summer youth program reported the program created or retained 556 more jobs than the 124 found in a review by the State Auditor's Office, a difference of more than 440 percent.
In a report released today, the state auditor said the Capital Area Workforce Development Board reported the summer employment jobs for low-income people aged 14 to 24 as full-time positions, although the program was designed to run eight to 10 weeks and be discontinued.
Alan Miller, executive director for Workforce Solutions for the Capital Area Board, defended the way the board reported to the Texas Workforce Commission the creation or retention of 681 jobs during the three months ending Sept. 30. He said the differences with the state auditor over the numbers demonstrates the confusion and disagreement created by a system of reporting jobs at the federal level that has changed several times since the $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed in February 2009.
If his board's experiences are any indication, Miller said he believes getting accurate or realistic estimates of how many jobs stimulus spending has created will be difficult.
"This isn't just a problem with us or in Texas, it's everywhere in the country," Miller said in an interview today. "We followed the instructions provided to us, but the rules have been confusing and subject to change. Let's just say that the state auditor's view of the reporting shows how subjectively the rules can be interpreted."
In their report, state auditors concluded the Capital Area Board chose to do a head count of the people hired for the summer youth employment program, rather than use a formula for calculating full-time employees by the number of hours worked in a given period. The report goes on to say the board made changes that reduced its overreporting to about 12 percent.
Miller countered that the board was told by the federal government the program was temporary, but believed the federal reporting guidelines encouraged counting the jobs as having been created by the program.
"In this case they were all temporary jobs. We knew that," Miller said. "But I guess you can say they were jobs created, because they didn't exist before the program. This is the conundrum we're operating under here."
The audit made the same critique of the board in its hiring of 10 full-time staff for training at career centers through a $1.6 million stimulus program for dislocated workers and an $893,000 low-income adult training program. The staffing is considered temporary based on the stimulus grants. The board reported having created 10 jobs. The state auditor calculated the board had created 4.13 jobs.
The Government Accounting Office in a report issued in November 2009 acknowledged the scope of the confusion and criticized the federal Office of Management and Budget for a lack of clarity.
"Problems with the interpretation of this guidance or the calculation of FTEs (full-time employees) were one of the most significant problems we found. Jobs created or retained expressed in FTEs raised questions and concerns for some recipients. While reporting employment effects as FTEs should allow for the aggregation of different types of jobs—part-time, full-time, or temporary—and different employment periods, if the calculations are not consistent, the ability to aggregate the data is compromised."
Miller said that although the Capital Area Board has a clearer view of the auditor's interpretation and did not formally object to the auditors' findings, he isn't certain the state's view of job creation and retention matches that of the federal government. "I can tell you, in the future, before we file our reports," Miller said, "we're going to run them by the Auditor's Office."
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