Congress’s watchdog, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), just released its fifth and the most recent of its required reports on the progress of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The full report is available by clicking here . Some findings:

• “Treasury had disbursed $330 billion of the roughly $700 billion in TARP funds. Most of the funds ($200 billion) went to purchase preferred shares and subordinated debentures of 623 financial institutions under the Capital Purchase Program (CPP).”
   
• Some institutions participating in TARP “have paid about $1.9 billion to repurchase shares and Treasury announced that it expects to receive approximately $68 billion from CPP repurchases later in June 2009.”
   
• GAO finds that Treasury has also provided “little information” on how they plan to value an institution warrants under repurchase transactions. GAO states that, “a well-designed, fully vetted transparent process becomes critical to defusing questions about the warrant valuation process and whether the resulting prices paid by the institutions reflect the taxpayers’ best interests.”

An overall takeaway from the reports’ summary “Highlights” page is that Treasury continues to not be transparent enough about the information it has regarding TARP institutions, especially those 19 that recently underwent “stress tests.” And while Treasury has made progress in hiring asset managers to help monitor compliance, GAO notes that, “Treasury has yet to clearly identify the role that asset managers will have in monitoring compliance; it has only noted that the asset managers will have a limited role in the area of executive compensation oversight.”

TCS will continue to work  with our partner organizations and Congress to push for more transparency in the TARP program. With close to a trillion taxpayer dollars at stake, we all deserve a full accounting of whether our best interests are kept first and foremost in mind.