Prior to taking office as President, one of Senator Obama’s major accomplishments was the enactment of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA), a bill he co-authored with Oklahoma Republican Senator Coburn. The legislation created USASpending.gov, a web portal for information about government grants and contracts. But a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report reminds us that bad data well-presented is still bad data – it just looks better.

The GAO report found that agencies failed to report $619 billion worth of grants and loans in 2012, almost 20 percent of the estimated $3.2 trillion total. The Department of Health and Human Services alone neglected to disclose assistance awards totaling a whopping $544 billion, which were almost entirely direct payments to individuals (e.g. doctors). The Department is now reporting that data in an aggregated form. The whole debacle underscores the need for clarity about the rules and methodology. Because even accurate information can turn into bad data if it isn’t properly recorded or even entered into the system.

But the lack of clarity and resulting inaccuracies relating to assistance awards isn’t the only barrier to having reliable disclosure of government spending information.  USASpending.gov pulls its data from existing federal systems. The Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation (FPDS-NG) for contract data and the Federal Assistance Award Data System PLUS (FAADS+) for grants. Both are cumbersome to use and honestly, USASpending is not a whole lot better, proving the point that simply putting information online does not equal transparency: it has to be accurate, easy-to-find, understandable, searchable, downloadable, and sortable at the very least.

Yes, the task of making spending transparent is difficult, but the result doesn’t have to be cumbersome. Recovery.gov was created to enable people to track American Recovery and Reconstruction Act (ARRA – the stimulus) spending and it was clean, had maps and graphics, and was – whether you liked the stimulus or not – well regarded. If government could do this very quickly for one spending package, it should be able to do so across-the-board.

This desire for standardization, clarity, and accuracy of data led to the recent enactment of the DATA Act (Digital Accountability and Transparency Act), signed into law a few months ago. This legislation would respond to some of the criticisms the GAO put at the feet of the Office of Management Budget who managed the USASpending.gov site until recently turning it over the Department of Treasury. But achieving its goals will take commitment on the part of government and government employees.

Taxpayers for Common Sense supported both FFATA and the DATA Act because both help empower citizens to learn where and how their tax dollars are being spent. But more needs to be done for transparency. It is still too hard to find out information about how lawmakers use their office budgets. Or who went where and did what on Congressional Delegation trips. And taxpayer-funded reports written by the Congressional Research Service – the research arm of Congress – are not made public. Some can be found on the web, but the unavailability of others has created a black market of reports, where people pay companies to obtain them. Knowledge is power, and hoarding information, or making it more difficult to find and understand, maintains that power.

Even in the guise of transparency data is often lost. The Library of Congress is updating the legislative data web page that was first started nearly 20 years ago. “Thomas” will be no more, but Congress.gov rises. But when you look at the chart of appropriations bills on the new web site, it only goes back to Fiscal Year 2011. On Thomas it went back to Fiscal Year 1997.

We know that making information about federal spending and federal actions available to the public takes work, thoughtful decision-making, and resources.  But transparency serves and important set of goals: it builds confidence in government by demonstrating where tax dollars are going, it deters waste and fraud by letting agencies know that we are watching, and it uncovers problems large and small, allowing the country to move towards finding solutions.