American Recovery and Reinvestment Act award recipients will no longer be required to make a subjective judgment on whether jobs were created or retained as a result of the act when submitting their Section 1512 quarterly reports in January 2010, according to new White House guidance.

Previously, recipients were required to total all hours worked from the current and all prior quarters and divide that total against a cumulative sum of all full-time hours from the current and prior reporting quarters. This ratio provided an average full-time equivalent estimate by project over all reporting quarters since the enactment of the Recovery Act. The job estimate calculation now has been changed so that recipients will report job estimate totals by dividing the hours worked in the reporting quarter (i.e., the most recent quarter) by the hours in a full-time schedule in that quarter. The Office of Management and Budget no longer requires recipients to total jobs data across multiple quarters.

In addition, the OMB changed the definition of a “job created or retained.” Previously, recipients were required to make a subjective judgment on whether a given job would have existed were it not for the Recovery Act. The updated guidance eliminates this subjective assessment and defines jobs created or retained as those funded in the quarter by the Recovery Act. Jobs funded with non-Recovery Act funds will not be counted unless they will be reimbursed. Jobs funded partially with Recovery Act funds will only be counted based on the proportion funded by the Recovery Act.

The OMB guidance is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-08.pdf.

For more information on section 1512 reporting or the Recovery Act in general, visit Thompson’s Economic Recovery Grants Center or see the upcoming issue of the Federal Grants Management Handbook.