Are you a recipient of a portion of the $787 billion in Recovery Act funding? Still confused about how you're supposed to report on your use of this money? Never fear, the Office of Management and Budget has the situation under control with a new series of webinars, all of which are focused on the new recipient reporting model.

This new model, which is detailed in the most recent OMB guidance, requires prime recipients (also their sub-recipients, if the prime recipients decide to delegate their reporting responsibilities) to report quarterly to FederalReporting.gov, the online data repository that will be feeding Recovery.gov. Then, prime recipients and the federal agencies review the reported information, and flag potentially erroneous information. But the finer details of the reporting model can be confusing. When should prime recipients delegate to sub-recipients? Can prime recipients alter sub-recipients' data? When will the public have access to the reported information? These questions were either not specifically addressed in the previous guidances, or were addressed in a vague way.

OMB's webinars are designed to help answer these questions. There are seven webinars in total, all this week, with the last one happening this afternoon. The topics are a little duplicative (do we really need three separate presentations titled "General Overview," "Basic Principles and Requirements of Recovery Act Recipient Reporting," and "Recipient Reporting Process Overview?"), but the webinars are very useful. I myself had the three questions above answered by the presentations (the answers are "when the sub-recipients have valuable job information," "no," and "October 11"), and I'm looking forward to the webinar titled "Sub-Recipient Reporting."

While you can't catch them live, since the registration period is over, OMB is putting the audio and accompanying Powerpoint presentations online; the Powerpoints now and the audio two days after the original presentation. So far, only the first couple webinars are up, but the first one, "General Overview," is online now, and is a good resource for those who need to get up to speed on the Recovery Act recipient reporting process or have little nitpicky question about the specifics of the system. The quality of the recordings is a little hit or miss, but overall they aren't that bad.

I'll highlight any of the future webinars on this blog if they are significant.