Did anyone recently hear about the 30 jobs that were saved in Arizona’s 15th Congressional District?

Well, if you have been on the White Houses’ stimulus tracking Web site, recovery.gov, then you probably have.

The only issue with the report is that there is no 15th Congressional District in Arizona. In fact, Arizona tops out at eight.

According to ABC News, Ed Pound, an official in charge of tracking the stimulus spending for the Recovery Board, said many of the mistakes recently found both in Arizona and in districts across the U.S. were a result of “human error.”

Pound told ABC News the Recovery Board merely reports whatever it receives from the stimulus recipients i.e. state governments, federal agencies, universities, etc. Pound said the blame falls on stimulus recipients for failing to report accurate information regarding their own districts.

Liz Oxhorn, the communications director for the stimulus effort, reiterated Pound’s sentiment, telling The Washington Post the job creation statistics that were reported on recovery.gov are in fact legitimate. However, because of errors on the part of stimulus recipients, the congressional districts were numbered differently.

However, Republican Darrell Issa of California’s 49th Congressional District referred to it as “propaganda” in a special congressional committee last Thursday that sought to sort out the issue.

Furthermore, in a Thursday column in The Washington Examiner, Issa said month after month, the American people have been led to believe the stimulus was working while the Recovery Board was putting out a “dubious number of jobs created or saved.”

Issa attacked the vice president, whose responsibilities include overseeing the recovery effort, who in Issa’s view “shamelessly continued to claim credit for as many as one million jobs” the stimulus has supposedly created thus far.

Although the news media has not covered the story as closely as many would like, the errors that have been discovered thus far have given plenty of ammunition to the opponents of the American Recovery and Reconstruction Act.

Republican Rep. Mary Fallin recently said in The Oklahoman that she seriously doubted much of the stimulus data released so far. After all, who can blame her?

Recovery.gov reported $11.6 million of the stimulus money went to Oklahoma’s 25th Congressional District and another $10 million to Oklahoma’s 51st District. But Oklahoma only has five congressional districts.

All the accounting errors that have taken place so far can’t be too helpful while the Senate is in the midst of passing legislation that will lead to the government takeover of health care.

Fallin reiterated this pretention when she said, “We’re talking about turning over one-sixth of our economy and our personal health to the federal government, and here they can’t even administer the stimulus money.”

But even if jobs were created in some districts, it does not necessarily mean the stimulus dollars were spent properly.

An investigation into stimulus creation by the Houston affiliate of ABC News reported last Wednesday that all the stimulus money awarded to the Houston area totaled $1.3 billion, and all those stimulus dollars have only helped create 1,104.4 jobs. It seems that quite a lot of spending went on and not a whole lot of job creation, unless of course stimulus jobs pay that well.

Most striking in the investigation was the largest recipient of stimulus dollars in the Houston area, METRO, the transit authority, has received $87 million in stimulus dollars but has so far created three and a half jobs at METRO, according ABC News Houston.

Ultimately, the American people deserve and should very well demand better accounting of stimulus dollars. But most importantly they should demand legitimate oversight and transparency.

Reach Joseph at jhermiz@asu.edu.