Oversight committee Chairman calls on Biden to convene IT leaders to track ARRA.

Chairman Towns Calls on Vice President Biden to Convene IT Roundtable, Establish Uniform Approach to Track Stimulus Funds

Washington, D.C. – U.S Representative Edolphus “Ed” Towns (D-NY), the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, today announced that he is calling on Vice President Joseph R. Biden to convene a high-tech roundtable of information technology (IT) leaders to develop a uniform approach to track and account for ARRA funding. Chairman Towns is concerned that Recovery.gov, the Administration’s primary transparency tool, is not yet capable of tracking funding from each federal, state, and local agency that receives stimulus funds.

Chairman Towns urged the Vice President, who was tapped by President Obama to coordinate oversight of stimulus spending under ARRA, to form the IT roundtable immediately and begin to identify business models, best practices, proposals, and solutions that can be used to meet the transparency goals of the Recovery Act.

During a full committee hearing today titled, “Preventing Stimulus Waste and Fraud: Who Are the Watchdogs?”, Chairman Towns said:

“I have major concerns about the Administration’s primary transparency tool, Recovery.gov. The fact of the matter is that Recovery.gov is currently not a useable database… I will be sending a letter to the Vice President, urging him to convene a high-tech roundtable of federal, state and private sector IT leaders to come up with a uniform approach to track and account for Recovery Act funding. We need to come up with a workable solution to what information is needed, in what form that information is needed and how that information should be displayed.”

Document:

Letter to Vice President Joseph R. Biden