Susan Collins

Preventing fraud in the execution of stimulus funding is a key element to the ultimate success of the Recovery Act.

It is critical. I am very pleased that Maine has the opposite situation of Connecticut.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just one final question for me.

As much as 7 percent of the Recovery Act funds may be lost to fraud and abuse.

I think a lot of the work that you are doing, while extremely worthwhile, is probably the tip of the iceberg.

It would indeed be unfortunate and ironic if money is lost to waste, fraud, and abuse because States had insufficient funds to hire the necessary contracting officials, auditors, and oversight employees.

These funds must be disbursed quickly to meet the goal of stimulating the economy.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is vital legislation intended to boost our troubled economy and to create and save jobs.

Double-counting types of situations, because the one you were describing, an argument could be made, well, did that second job then kill 50 jobs.

My concern about having two different methods of measuring job creation or the number of jobs saved is that it could serve to undermine the public's confidence in the credibility of the numbers.

If recovery is to be successful in cities and towns, the first most important thing we need to do is help educate our local leaders.

The Administration has estimated that more than 3 million jobs will either be saved or created by this Act.

I believe it is incumbent upon all of us to ensure that does not happen.

It is going to be a challenge. I will not try to softball that one.

I am fearful that a lot of people will fall for that scam because--and what I think was an error in policy--we did do these one-time checks a year or so ago of $300 or $600 to taxpayers.

I would add, it did not reconcile the funding in that Act with the funding that we had just approved.

If you take $787 billion, even if it is a 1 percent loss, you are talking about a huge amount of money

Do you support legislation that would allow for the rehiring of annuitants without their incurring a financial penalty?

It is extraordinarily important that we track the job creation provisions of this bill so that we know whether or not we were successful in creating or saving 3.5 million jobs.

I think if you are looking at re-employing annuitants, we have to take away the huge financial disincentive for them to come back to work.

Our vision in authorizing such a core of experienced contracting officials applies exactly to this kind of situation.

The intent--indeed, the letter of the stimulus act--requires Federal, State, and local governments, but also private businesses, that are receiving money under the Recovery Act to adhere to the transparency and accountability requirements.

The board is meant to ensure coordinated and comprehensive oversight of stimulus spending and provide regular reports to Congress and the public.

The more eyes, the better, clearly

Now the challenge is to make sure that the billions of dollars provided by that law achieve the purpose of boosting our economy and saving and creating jobs.