Most of the $41 billion in annual federal highway spending is not being adequately tracked by the Federal Highway Administration, a new report from the Government Accountability Office found.
Lax reporting standards by the FHWA make it difficult to track the start-to-finish costs for most projects financed by federal highway dollars, the GAO said in a report released Thursday. All but about $2 billion of the money is passed on to states to build roads and bridges.
FHWA does track total aggregated costs for individual projects that will cost $500 million or more. Data also are reported on individual segments of smaller projects — for instance, how much was spent on planning, engineering, land acquisition and construction of particular segment of road.
But there is no detailed reporting requirement for cumulative spending on construction projects that cost less than $500 million, which account for about 88 percent of the money that is spent, GAO found.
That level of disclosure could easily be obtained through the Financial Management Information System already used to report spending.
“Although FHWA is able to collect and report federal obligations by individual contract, it is not able to aggregate this information to collect and report total federal obligations for an entire project,” GAO concluded.
“Because one project can include many contracts over many years and FMIS does not automatically link contracts to projects, FHWA has little easily accessible information to help it determine the total overall costs of each project, other than the major projects,” GAO said.
FMIS electronic reporting software already includes fields that states could use to report total spending on a particular job. Those fields are not used.
FHWA officials opposed the enhanced reporting requirement recommended by GAO, arguing it would drive up compliance costs.
The simple change in reporting requirements would make it easier to monitor the cost of roadwork that falls short of the $500 million threshold, the GAO said.
Money raised for the Highway Trust Fund has been dropping significantly, in part because inflation has eroded the value of the 18.4 cents-per-gallon tax on gasoline set in 1993, and in part because of decreasing demand for gasoline that results from more fuel-efficient cars, according to GAO.
Congress has allocated more than $50 billion in general revenues to augment the highway fund since 2008.
Over the next 10 years, the trust fund earnings will fall about $157 billion short of what is needed to maintain current levels of highway spending.
Changing the reporting requirements would make it easier for the federal highway agency to monitor spending and identify waste, according to GAO.
