The Recovery Act required the Recovery Board to create and manage a website “to foster greater accountability and transparency in the use of funds made available in this Act.” The site displayed for the American public the distribution of all ARRA funds by federal agencies and how the recipients are spending those funds. The site also offered the public the ability to report suspected fraud, waste, or abuse related to ARRA funding.
All the data on the site came from two sources:
• Federal agencies submitted Financial and Activity Reports that can be found in the Agency Reported section of the site.
• The recipient data displayed on the site was pulled directly from the reports submitted by the recipients at FederalReporting.gov, also managed by the Board. The data was not changed, altered, or corrected by the Board prior to posting. In January 2014, Congress repealed the quarterly reporting provision of the Recovery Act; therefore, the recipients reported for the last time January 1 through January 14, 2014. The Board provided an extended period for agencies and recipients to make changes or corrections to the data and on May 1, 2014, all the data was posted to Recovery.gov.
Recovery.gov went live on February 17, 2009. In anticipation of having to post millions of pieces of information from the recipients of ARRA funds, the site was rebuilt and redesigned from the ground up, and was relaunched in September 2009. In December 2013, Recovery.gov was rebranded as the Board's official website to include not only data on ARRA funding but also data on Hurricane Sandy funding.
In August, 2014, the Board made the decision not to renew the license that allowed for the display of the certain data. That data was removed as of October 1, 2014.
Watch the video: Recovery.gov/ARRA Overview