TARP Watchdog Growls at Treasury over Lack of Transparency

ProPublica

But if you want to know what they’ve been doing with the money, it gets tougher. Actually, until Monday, you would have been out of luck. The Treasury Department doesn’t require that companies report their use of the money, so the special inspector general for the TARP (SIGTARP), Neil Barofsky, surveyed every company earlier this year. His office’s report, released Monday, provided an overview that wasn’t available before.

In the SIGTARP’s quarterly review of the $700 billion bailout, released today (PDF), he says this lack of “basic transparency” has become a pattern: "TARP has become a program in which taxpayers (i) are not being told what most of the TARP recipients are doing with their money, (ii) have still not been told how much their substantial investments are worth, and (iii) will not be told the full details of how their money is being invested."

In addition to regularly questioning recipients of TARP money about how they’re using it (which Treasury has refused to do), the SIGTARP wants the department to produce regular reports showing how much the assets it has bought with the bailout funds are worth. The Treasury is only required to make such a disclosure annually, even though it gets monthly reports from its asset managers.

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