Crow-Eating Time

Last week, I wrote a little slice-of-contracting life story about how incorrect data about federal contracts -- sometimes off by hundreds of millions of dollars -- can make its way into federal spending databases, and require updating later. But I was wrong in that story about exactly how and when those databases were updated. On the particular contract I referenced, information had been updated in a more timely fashion than I indicated -- just in a separate place from where I was looking. The article has been updated and corrected, and there's an official correction on our Corrections page.

I still think there's a broader point to the article about erroneous data sometimes creeping in to federal spending records. But that doesn't change the fact that I made some pretty significant errors in telling the story. And I wanted to publicly take responsibility for them.