This morning the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing to receive updated information from the federal watchdog agencies charged with overseeing the spending of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Testifying were the heads of the Government Accountability Office (GAO, testimony ), the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP, testimony ) and the Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP, testimony ). (Treasury did not testify at today’s hearing, but they did unveil today a new public website, FinancialStability.gov , for tracking TARP money.  Also, a lengthier GAO report on TARP is here .)

Treasury received some credit for moving in the direction of taking steps to be more transparent in the way TARP was implemented. But the watchdogs were critical in many areas, especially so was the head of COP, Elizabeth Warren, who testified that Treasury is not being forthcoming to her panel with the information they have been seeking. And Neil Barofsky, the SIGTARP, also described how he was still having difficulty receiving details from banks on how they were spending the money. Barofsky noted in his testimony that, “If, by percentage terms, some of the estimates of fraud in recent government programs apply to the TARP programs, we are looking at the potential exposure of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money lost to fraud.”