Proposed legislation would alter how federal agencies report spending. Photo: Shutterstock

House Republicans are wasting no time in riding the momentum provided by the recent General Services Administration spending scandal to push for legislation designed to bring more transparency to the way government agencies spend money.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform made H.R. 2146, the Digital Accountability & Transparency Act (DATA) available for public comment on its Madison platform online Wednesday in anticipation of a floor vote next week. Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's spokesman Ali Ahmad says that the chairman, who is the chief sponsor of the legislation, would take into account any comments left on Madison.

A new coalition of private companies, chaired by Issa's former Oversight Committee counsel, Hudson Hollister, also launched this week to promote legislation related to technology and transparency.

The coalition of 13 tech vendors and a non-profit association of certified public accountants from Maryland launched this week with the goal of promoting more transparency across the government by encouraging proposals such as the DATA Act. Its advisory board include the Recovery Board's Devaney, Eric Gillespie, a managing partner at Viano Capital, an investment firm specializing in data and information services firms, Jim Harper, the Cato Institute's director of information policy studies, New York Law School's Beth Simone Noveck, a law professor and former White House deputy chief technology officer, and Campbell Pryde, the President and CEO of XBRL US. (XBRL stands for Extensible Business Reporting Language.)

The coalition generally supports initiatives like the DATA Act that make government information machine-readable so that it is more accessible to the public online.

The group writes in an inaugural blog post:

Because financial regulatory reporting isn't standardized, companies must submit the same information many times - for example, more than two-thirds of the data reported to the Bureau of Economic Analysis is also filed, separately, with the SEC. And nobody - neither financial regulators nor market analysts - can easily digest all of a company's filings or search them together to find hidden leverage or systemic risk.

Brazil, the United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands are all ahead of the United States in this realm of data standardization, they point out.

The group is also focusing its attention on the Financial Industry Transparency Act, which would bring more efficiency to financial regulation, the Public Online Information Act, which would "establish a presumption of transparency for all federal data," as well as other initiatives that would make transactions between the business world and the government more efficient.

The movement on the DATA Act comes as both chambers of Congress try to address revelations from the GSA's inspector general that the Western offices of the agency used its money as if they were part of the Silicon Valley elite, spending the money on lavish conferences with mind-readers and clowns.

Issa, a California Republican, first introduced the legislation last June. The intention is to establish a permanent, independent body that would do the work of standardizing the process of reporting federal spending in a timely and accurate manner. A second key goal of the legislation is to get all federal agencies and the businesses and groups it does business with to adopt standard identifiers in order to report information in a consistent format, and to ensure accurate and non-duplicative reporting of spending. The body would be modeled on the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which was chaired by Earl Devaney.

The legislation specifies that information about government spending would be made available online through a "Federal Accountability Portal."

Ahmad added that a manager's amendment has tried to address state and localities' concerns by specifying that the legislation is not going to require additional reporting but, but should be viewed as one that will replace the fractured system that's currently in place. State and local governments rely on federal money for a wide range of programs, such as in health care, transportation and education — making them a key constituency for this legislation.

The federal government currently reports federal spending information at USAspending.gov, but both the Sunlight Foundation and the Congressional Research Service have found the information to be often unreliable and inaccurate.

The DATA Act has a Senate counterpart with the same name in the form of S.1222, sponsored by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner. It was also introduced last June, and has yet to be acted upon at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.