Transparency and Fraud

Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene have posted an interesting interview with Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board chief Earl Devaney over at the IBM Center for the Business of Government. Here's Devaney on how pushing for transparency on the front end of federal projects can cut down on abuse later:

It turns out that if you have transparency . . . you have less fraud than you normally would. I'm knocking on wood here, but the dire predictions have turned out to be wrong. . . We have a website where millions of people can go and see what's spent in their own neighborhood. We have reporters getting up every morning to look for the $900 hammer stories.

It's like having a house in a neighborhood with lights and barbed wire and a sign that says 'Mad Dog Inside'. Would you rob that house or go down the street? There were so many eyeballs on this money that it deterred bad guys from coming around. If I was going to steal money, I wouldn't steal this money.

The relative lack of horror stories in Recovery Act spending (and, as Devaney notes in the interview, it's not as if reporters haven't been hunting for them) is one of the more remarkable achievements in federal management and oversight in recent memory.