Data Gaps Hinder Tracking of Local COVID-19 Funds

Attempts to assess data needed to track COVID-19 pandemic relief funding from multiple federal agencies used to assist local communities are excessively complicated due to the use of multiple disparate federal data systems, the Pandemic Relief Accountability Committee (PRAC) concluded in a recent report.

The case-study report sought to determine how much pandemic relief funding was received from 10 federal agencies by six selected communities nationwide — Springfield, Mass.; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Sheridan County, Neb.; Marion County, Ga.; the White Earth Nation Reservation in Minnesota; and the Jicarilla Apache Nation Reservation in New Mexico. These communities received federal funds from the departments of Agriculture; Education; Health and Human Services; Homeland Security; Housing and Urban Development; Interior; Labor; Transportation; Treasury and the Small Business Administration. Future reports in this series will review how the communities used their funding and whether the funds helped them recover from the pandemic.

Using a combination of federal, state and local data sources, the PRAC determined that the 10 federal agencies provided about $2.65 billion in pandemic relief funds to the six selected communities through approximately 89 pandemic relief programs and subprograms during the first 18 months of the pandemic (i.e., March 2020 through September 2021). The PRAC added that such funds can flow to communities in many forms (e.g., grants, loans, direct assistance, contracts) and can be used for various purposes, such as supporting the operations of local governments responding to the pandemic; keeping workers paid and employed; securing housing and rental assistance; protecting against food insecurity; supporting schools, teachers and students; and addressing other community needs.

Multiple Data Sources

However, tracking these dollars required PRAC’s oversight team to access several federal, state and local data sources, including nonpublic databases, and previous PRAC reports have highlighted limitations specific to tracking funding data, particularly as it relates to pandemic relief funding at the second tier subrecipient level, due to gaps in publicly available data sources. In one case, a team member had to access five separate internal agency databases to determine all the recipients for a single pandemic program.

In addition, federal, state and local agencies warehouse data in a variety of different ways and in different formats. “In some cases, the PRAC oversight team’s visibility into tracking pandemic funds to the communities was hindered because of technology limitations,” according to the report. “This included databases that did not capture payments from recipients to individuals; could not generate reports as of a specified date requested by an OIG; did not include data fields to allow for coding recipients as receiving pandemic funds; or that contained duplicates due to data entry errors.”

For example, for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Tenant-Based Rental Assistance Program, HUD’s Office of Inspector General reported the “total spent” as “unknown” because of the nature of how the program funds were allocated and then delivered to public housing agencies (PHAs), noting that as of December 2021, no system was in place to determine how much PHAs spent from local accounts after receiving funds from HUD.

USAspending.gov Issues

The PRAC’s oversight team, as cited in the report, concluded that there are limitations to the data used at USAspending.gov, the federal government’s primary site housing federal spending data (see ¶215 in the Single Audit Information Service module). “Attempts to only use USAspending.gov would not enable full identification of pandemic funding due to differences among USAspending.gov and other nonpublic data sources not accounted for on the publicly available USAspending.gov website,” the report noted. “To its credit, USAspending.gov has disclosed several of these data limitations, but as evidenced by our work, more limitations exist. The PRAC is continuing to explore the significance of these limitations on the quality of pandemic relief data on USAspending.gov compared to the other sources used in our efforts to track the flow of pandemic funds to the six selected communities.”

The federal spending data reflected on USAspending.gov comes from more than 100 government systems — some of which are routed through other agencies and external systems before they are uploaded to USAspending.gov. Therefore, “the data available on USAspending.gov is only as good as the data uploaded from federal agencies’ systems or from recipient reporting systems, which as previously described is derived from other government systems — many of which have their own limitations and issues,” the PRAC added.

The PRAC explained that reports it will release later this year pertaining to the six communities will focus on their experiences, “as funding information alone does not paint the full picture on how these funds were used and the impact they had.” “The only way to truly understand how local communities worked through pandemic challenges and used federal funding in those efforts is to see it for yourself and hear about it from the people in those communities,” the report stated, noting that the PRAC oversight team recently visited these communities and spoke with local officials, business owners and community organizations to gain additional insights into how federal funds were used, what challenges they faced and what creative solutions they employed to help their constituents and neighbors survive the pandemic.

For More Information

The PRAC report is available at https://tinyurl.com/42dbmhbk.