On Wednesday, legislation to bring federal spending information into the daylight was favorably reported by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The DATA Act, which would improve and expand public reporting of federal spending information, has lost a few of its bells and whistles since it passed the House last Congress, but likely  gained the ability to move in the Senate.

The House version, introduced by Reps. Darrell Issa and Elijah Cummings, now more closely mirrors a Senate counterpart introduced by Sens. Mark Warner and Bob Portman. This bi-partisan bi-cameral effort bodes well for its future.

As we've written before, only congressional pressure can drive real spending reforms, at least these days, and the mere threat of the DATA Act has encouraged the administration to start to pay lip service towards spending transparency. But it's not enough. Information on grants obligations is still unusable three years after we began highlighting its deficiencies, even with some congressional prodding. It's time to go to the next level.

The DATA Act will bring more datasets online, including actual spending information, so we can verify whether the reporting is accurate. It will require the use of consistent identifiers, so we can compare apples to apples. And it will empower the creation of standards so that everyone reports what they've got,  and we're all on the same page.

While the legislation is not a panacea, it goes a long way towards empowering all of us to truly follow the money, including many government officials who are often left in the dark. It's probably the biggest bite of the apple we can hope for at the moment, while laying the groundwork for further improvements. Our friends at POGO have identified 10 questions that USASpending.gov cannot answer ... and we hope that the DATA Act will help the government finally get a passing grade.

As the legislation has previously passed the House, it seems likely to pass again, much to the House's credit. We can expect to see real fireworks in the Senate.

The Sunlight Foundation's sister organization, the Sunlight Network, is organizing Citizen Advocacy Day, an exciting opportunity for citizens to let their members of Congress know how important a transparent government is to them. The event will take place May 6, the day after what is shaping up to be an eventful, fun and informative TransparencyCamp.

Citizen advocates will have a chance to talk to key policy staff for their Members of Congress about important transparency issues, like smarter open data through the DATA Act, making sure the Senate keeps up the with the times by mandating electronic filing of campaign finance reports and getting more disclosure about lobbying and the financial interests of members of Congress and their staff.

Sunlight will brief citizen advocates (and feed them breakfast!) the morning of the Advocacy Day to arm them with talking points about key transparency related priorities.

Sunlight advocates on ways to improve transparency of government information but we can’t do it alone. Become a Citizen Advocate and help shine a light on our government.

In a speech Wednesday, OMB controller Danny Werfel reportedly declared that improving the completeness and reliability of data on the federal spending transparency website USASpending is a "priority" of OMB. He reportedly indicated that OMB will issue guidance to prompt agency internal review about the reliability of their reporting.

If this news account is accurate -- and I could not reach anyone at the White House or OMB to confirm -- Mr. Werfel's remarks are welcome if they express a genuine administration commitment to address the government's systematic failure to accurately publicly report how the federal government spends money. The failure to report is of an enormous magnitude. Our recently released third annual ClearSpending analysis found more than $1.55 trillion in misreported federal spending for FY 2011... just in grants alone. (The prior two years didn't look too good, either.)

These accuracy problems shouldn't be a surprise to the administration. Sunlight testified twice before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on this topic (on March 11 and June 14, 2011) -- Mr. Werfel testified at the same March hearing (watch it here). We've also communicated our findings directly to the administration. (And others, like the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, have made similar points.)

Now, in 2013, momentum is again building behind a comprehensive approach to address the federal government's spending report problems -- embodied in the proposed federal spending transparency reform bill known as the DATA Act. This bipartisan legislation, which passed the House and was introduced in the Senate in the last Congress, addresses the longstanding issues that Mr. Werfel alluded to.

In 2012, Mr. Werfel expressed concerns about the DATA Act. However, to many observers, the criticisms looked more like an attempt to protect OMB's turf than an effort to address the reporting problems. The substance of his critiques were addressed in a blogpost by the Data Transparency Coalition, which wryly noted that "in the six years since FFATA's enactment, OMB has not tried to standardize federal spending data." Touché.

It could be that this new OMB guidance -- that no one outside government has seen or heard of until Wednesday -- is OMB's attempt to grapple with the difficult federal spending transparency issues that it has failed to comprehensively address over the last four years. But a more cynical assessment could be that the administration sees that its failure to address these issues has prompted a systematic, bipartisan transparency reform effort -- an effort that could weaken OMB's control over access to spending information -- and it will pay lip service to delay or blunt any such effort.

We hope that this recently-articulated administration desire to act on federal spending transparency has come from the realization that this is an issue where we cannot afford to wait. But it's fair to say that politics may more pressing upon OMB than policy in this matter. And if that's the case, then we should express our thanks for the assurances and move swiftly to enacting the DATA Act, because that's the driver of real reform.

It's a little late, but it's here! We've released an updated version of Clearspending with data that spans from 2009 to 2011. Unfortunately, it comes fresh off the heels of the Senate's failure to pass the DATA Act, which would have dramatically expanded and improved federal spending reporting. We're hopeful the DATA Act will get a second chance this Congress, especially since Clearspending's results show that USASpending.gov's problems with consistency, timeliness and completeness are ever-present.

As outlined in our methodology, Clearspending measures the grant spending in USASpending.gov across three metrics: consistency, completeness, and timeliness. Here's a quick breakdown of the overall failing dollar amounts (and rates) across all three metrics (without double counting dollars that failed for multiple metrics) for 2009-2011:

Note that just because a dollar failed doesn't mean that the government doesn't know where that money is. But it does mean that there is at least one problem with how the government reports this spending on the public facing site. And that is the main point of USASpending.gov -- to be the publicly searchable version of federal spending that the public can use to hold government accountable. It deserves to be just as accurate as the information included on a federal audit.

You can still drill down by agency and program to see where the specific reporting problems lie. One new feature we've added this year is some slick D3 interactive graphics for each of the three metrics (consistency, completeness and timeliness).

So take a look around, and while you're at it, ask your representatives to support the DATA act!

Yesterday I got a Scout alert, notifying me of a proposed rule change by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in how electric utilities report their prices. The major rule change isn't of major concern to me, but it did include a passage that I found interesting:

However, DUNS numbers have proven to be an imprecise identification system, as entities may have multiple DUNS numbers, only one DUNS number, or no DUNS number at all. The Commission has considered various alternatives to the use of DUNS numbers, but finds none of the suggested approaches would provide a viable replacement. Accordingly, the Commission will continue to rely on the insertion of customer company names in the free-form fields, Field Numbers 16 and 48. In this regard, however, the Commission finds reasonable Entergy’s suggestion to require reporting of the name of the entity exactly as it appears on the reported contract, in both the contract and transaction sections.

The Commission's comments clearly summarize why the government's reliance on DUNS numbers for entity identification is problematic. This comes in the wake of a GAO report that came to very similar conclusions but explored the problems with DUNS numbers from a federal spending perspective. The GAO report also discussed the problems with the restrictions on the reuse of DUNS numbers, as well as their considerable expense ($154 million over three years).

Most notably though, the Commission notes the lack of a feasible alternative. It's true that an ideal alternative might not be available quite yet, but matching based on name alone is one of the least reliable ways of crosswalking company data. At the very least, the commission could require that the entity's home jurisdiction of incorporation (usually a state) and related number be reported. This would allow the data to be linked to company data in OpenCorporates or to the state registries.

Thankfully, more and more agencies and organizations are realizing the far reaching consequences of not having a reliable and unique entity identifier. We even saw a provision in the House version of the DATA act that required the use of non-proprietary identifiers for recipients in federal spending data. Unfortunately, this provision has not made it to the Senate version. We hope that this provision makes it into the final version of the DATA Act, spurring some movement forward on an issue that underpins so many areas of our concern here at Sunlight.

Before the Senate recessed on Friday, Senators Warner and Portman reintroduced the DATA Act, which would transform how the federal government makes financial information available to the public. Our friends at the Data Transparency Coalition and OMB Watch issued statements lauding the legislation. We agree.

While we're still reviewing the many changes vis-a-vis the House-passed version, we thought it would be helpful to show how the bill would change current law. Accordingly, we've included a hand-crafted redline below, which shows the current law and how the bill would change it. We'll have more to say soon.

Updated DATA Act Redline 2012-09-21