Earl Devaney, who was appointed Chairman of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board by President Obama, speaks on transparency, accountability, Recovery.gov 2.0 and the future of Citizen Inspectors General

E: How did you become involved in the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board?

ED: I’ve written a lot of scathing reports, and each of those, if you go back and look at them, has this sort of carping about lack of transparency and lack of accountability. So, the question of why would I be goofy enough, after 40 years in government, to take this job with a lot of high risk involved is that really I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to partake in such a noble experiment on accountability and transparency after I’ve spent so many years railing about them. I’m really in this for no other reason than to see if I can actually start something that somebody else will finish some other day. I’m excited about that possibility.

E: What is the mission of the Board?

ED: Our mission is sort of two fold: The more intuitive one is the fraud, waste and abuse portfolio which is a normal thing for Inspectors General (IGs) to do. Although the money is profound, comfort level is high there.

The other half of the mission is creating a website which purports to be historically transparent but at the same time has to be user friendly. We have to have a website that will put all the recipient data online for everybody to see. In trying to achieve a balance we need the website to be user friendly so that Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Ohio can go on and hopefully go on more than once. It’s a balancing act.

I don’t know why Congress decided that 13 IGs was a perfect solution to creating the government’s biggest website. If you find the author of that notion on the Hill would you let me know? I haven’t found that person yet. But, you know, I have spent 40 years in government so I think I can put together a team that can do that. Because of the notoriety of the project I’ve been able to sort of muscle my way around the government and sort of beg, borrow and steal the best and brightest in the IT world in government and the private sector as well. We’re gonna pull this off; we’re going to do it.

E: Is there evidence that John Doe or Mr. and Mrs. Smith are using the website now?
ED: There’s certainly evidence that a lot of people are using the website. The website got 4,000 hits per second the day it went up. Now it’s dropped off a little bit but it’s still getting somewhere around 30,000 hits per minute. So yeah, there are a lot of people on it. When the data becomes rich sometime in October I suspect there will be more and more access to the website. At that point we will have hoped to have built the 2.0 version vs. the 1.0 version we’ve built today.

E: Do you see a whole bunch of new contractors coming to the table because of the stimulus plan? Is that why there might be more potential for fraud, waste and abuse?

ED: No, I think the potential for new fraud, waste and abuse comes from new programs rather than from new contractors. Maybe it’s also from new contractors getting into new programs. We don’t see risk in situations where there is infrastructure in place that has in the past received money from the federal government and doled it out – whether that be to states or subrecipients. We don’t see the risk as high there as we do with new programs created under this recovery plan. Most people use weatherization as an example. Although there has been some weatherization in the past, the money has been pretty small. Now you’ve got a whole lot of money going into a program that theoretically does not have the infrastructure or the internal controls in place to either receive or provide a level of assurance and comfort that that money will be handled appropriately when it is sent out. So in that situation we do a lot of risk modeling where we look at those risky programs and suggest that’s where IGs need to focus their attention.

“This transparency thing is not a question anymore; this cow is out of the barn and on down the road. I cannot imagine any politician standing up and saying, “Let’s do this the old non-transparent way.” That’s just not going to happen. What we’re seeing here is the beginning of a whole revolution within the government.”

I don’t know about new contractors, though I imagine within a program like this there will be new contractors contributing fraud. I know some states have decided to take out of work, licensed home contractors and people like that, and retrain them and put them into this work. That creates jobs to people that don’t have jobs anymore. If they’re licensed by the state there is some confidence there.

E: Do IGs ever look at contractor compliance programs, or is that more prosecutorial?

ED: Clearly if the contractors are on our suspended and debarred list they can’t get a contract with recovery monies. Oftentimes that happens. It doesn’t happen because somebody decided to commit a fraud at a federal agency, it’s usually because they don’t know there’s a list that they have to check and so they give the contract to somebody that shouldn’t have it. That’s not an unusual occurrence, but when we see it we stop it. Contractor performance is always an issue in awarding contracts.

E: Are there various preventative elements?

ED: We’ve changed the paradigm a bit because we’re trying to prevent fraud, waste and abuse as opposed to simply detecting it. For IGs that’s a cultural shift. IGs are very good at coming along and doing an audit that takes about a year, and then they find money has gone missing and they sometimes find where it has went and sometimes not. On the other hand, this act calls for the board and IGs to prevent fraud, waste and abuse, as opposed to using the word “detect.”

We’re doing a lot of upfront things like training procurement contractor training. We are training all of the federal government and are also assisting state and local entities as well. We’ve published a contractor check list for procurement officials to look at. So I think it’s fair to say we’re out there being as proactive as possible, talking to procurement officials as to what they’ve been looking at in respect to contractors and past performance.

At some point in the future we will have an accountability module built. We haven’t put that contract out on the street yet, but that will interface with the data that’s going to reside on recovery.gov. There we’ll be using public source documents of contractors that are appearing. We will be getting the numbers of the contractors and the recipients of these funds and we’ll be looking at those contractors with a view towards, “Do they have a history of fraud?” or “Have they been ever put on a list?”, or “Are they now operating under a new name that’s different than the one they actually were put on the list for?” Sometimes it’s the same people but they just went down the street and opened under a new name. All those kinds of things, those kinds of proactive activities, are going to go on here.

E: How do you see your organization really driving the culture in a proactive vs. reactive way? Is it through transparency or accountability modules or tools to influence the culture?

ED: I think it’s a little of all of that – learning new tools, looking for innovative technologies and so forth. I think I would start with the belief that whatever we do here will serve as a prototype for the future. This transparency thing is not a question anymore; this cow is out of the barn and on down the road. I cannot imagine any politician standing up and saying, “Let’s do this the old non-transparent way.” That’s just not going to happen. What we’re seeing here is the beginning of a whole revolution within the government. I think a lot of people haven’t gotten their heads around what’s going to happen when the American public sees how their money is being spent. It’s going to be a very interesting thing to sit there and watch.

E: What could happen?

ED: A range of things could happen, but I think it’s all going to happen this fall. I’m determined to put this data up, good, bad or indifferent, and let the chips fall where they may. I suspect that when that happens, given the amount of data and the amount of money involved here, somebody’s going to be embarrassed. And that’s really not my problem. That’s the role of this board, to make sure that data gets up in a transparent way and for everybody to see, for every reporter in America to click on the website in the morning and go look for that wonderful story that they’re looking for, it’ll be there.

Then the power of my millions of citizen IGs will appear, hopefully, and provide IGs with a forced multiplier they’ve never had before. I mean, when you think about it, if you’ve got millions of citizens looking at this data, they’re going to see things. They’re going to be the first responders on things that IGs would never even stumble across. Once people realize that, why would they want to try and steal this money?

I mean, you can make an argument that what might be happening here is we may be driving crime from one neighborhood to another. Instead of stealing recovery money because there is too much of a spotlight on it, they’re over here stealing this kind of money instead. That may be true in the short run, but ultimately if I’m right this is the way government will do its business in the future. More and more business will be done this way and less money will be exposed to fellows that will go take the low hanging fruit. Eventually it will be a very positive thing.

E: You talk about risk modeling – is there a rough guide somewhere out there listing the number of ways to spot what you commonly see?

ED: Conflict of interest is huge. You have to be concerned about that no matter what level of government you are in. The idea that the mayor’s brother-in-law, with a different name, is going to get a contract is always a concern. That is where my citizen IGs come into play. I doubt very much whether there’s somebody sitting in Washington looking directly at that contract who could discern that’s the mayor’s brother. But some citizen in that town who comes on our website, punches in their zip code to see how money in their neighborhood is being spent, is going to say, “Look at that, Ethel. That’s the mayor’s brother.” Hopefully that person will take the time to call us or email us and we’ll be on to something we never would have otherwise seen.

E: How will you measure success? It sounds like there are a lot of mileposts along the way.

ED: There can be a wonderful ending to this. Even if we make mistakes along the way, and I’m assuming we will, I truly believe what we’re doing here will serve as a foundation for what comes after. Long after I’m hitting the ball as straight as I can down a golf course in Florida, some successor of mine will take what was done here and build on it and make it better, hopefully.