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Economic Development Jobs Reporting

Report Information

Date Issued
Report Number
2022-17352
Report Type
Audit
Description
The Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Economic Development (ED) organization is primarily responsible for helping to maintain TVA’s industrial and manufacturing base, locate desirable companies to the Valley, and improve the competitiveness of Valley communities. TVA ED offers incentive programs and services to new and existing customers in the valley. TVA included information on jobs created and retained in the Tennessee Valley for which TVA has played a role in the recruitment or retention of the economic development project in their fiscal years 2019 through 2021 Securities and Exchange Commission reports and fiscal year 2020 Sustainability Report. Additionally, jobs created and/or retained are used as a metric in the corporate multiplier for the Winning Performance Team Incentive Plan and the Executive Annual Incentive Plan. Based on the reputational risk of disseminating inaccurate information to the public, we included an audit of TVA ED jobs reporting in our annual audit plan. Our audit objective was to determine if the job numbers reported externally by TVA ED are validated prior to being disseminated to the public in accordance with any best practices.We found TVA ED has a monthly process in place to review job number forecasts prior to reporting the numbers externally and that the number of jobs reported generally agreed with supporting documentation. However, we found the information presented to the public by TVA related to job creation and retention is not always clear, complete, or presented in the proper context as required by the TVA Information Quality Guidelines.
Joint Report
Yes
Participating OIG
Tennessee Valley Authority OIG
Agency Wide
Yes (agency-wide)
Questioned Costs
$0
Funds for Better Use
$0
View report on Oversight.gov

Recommendations

We recommend TVA’s Senior Vice President, Economic Development, clarify Economic Development’s definition of a retained job in annual reports and other public documents in which Economic Development jobs retained are reported.

We recommend TVA’s Senior Vice President, Economic Development, formally document the process for determining the jobs to count as created and the jobs to count as retained in internal guidance to ensure consistency in reporting going forward.

We recommend TVA’s Senior Vice President, Economic Development, clarify in annual reports and other public documents in which Economic Development jobs created and/or retained are reported (a) that jobs created numbers are based on projections and (b) the timeframe in which jobs are anticipated to be created.

We recommend TVA’s Senior Vice President, Economic Development, report jobs created and retained separately.

We recommend TVA’s Senior Vice President, Economic Development, provide better accuracy and transparency by waiting to record and report jobs created until after a customer enters into an agreement with TVA for a project.