Phil Mattera of Good Jobs First has a great post over at the Clawback blog, breaking down the reasons recipients gave for not reporting during the first round of Recovery Act recipient reporting (see my colleague Craig Jennings' earlier post on the non-reporting list released yesterday). Here are some of my favorites from Phil's list:

• Green Building Construction & Electric, Inc.: "Contractor said he simply forgot to do the report, even though contracting called and reminded him."
• Eureka Development, LLC: "Were not aware of the ARRA reporting requirements."
• Dell Federal Systems: "Lack of understanding of the reporting requirement and associated guidance."
• City of Pauls Valley: "Reporter Contracted H1N1, no backup."
• Johnson Controls Inc. and numerous other contractors for the Department of Veterans Affairs: "No valid reason discerned."

Although it's difficult to tell what the most common excuse was, again thanks to the lack of searchability in the PDF, it seems that simple lack of understanding was very prevalent. Many non-reporting recipients professed to be unaware of reporting requirements, which seems difficult to believe, considering all the agencies' education efforts and how much news coverage there was surrounding the Recovery Act. Then there's the fact that the reporting requirement was literally written into Recovery Act awards, making it hard to miss.

The silver lining in this cloud is that if the largest problem is simple lack of understanding among recipients, that's an easily fixable problem, and one agencies are already taking steps to fix. We'll have to wait until the end of the next reporting cycle in January to see which recipients were simply oblivious and which were willfully negligent in their reporting duties.

As an aside, it should be noted that the total number of missing reports (4,359) is much smaller than the one originally thrown around by the Office of Management and Budget. At a House Oversight Committee hearing a couple weeks ago, OMB officials thought that as many as 10% of awards were missing from the first round of reporting, which would have translated into over 13,000 reports. In that light, and considering this was the first nation-wide recipient reporting cycle ever, 4,369 missing reports, representing just over a 3% error rate, isn't too bad.

Image by Flickr user psd used under a Creative Commons license.