Stimulus "confusion"

"The federal government sent Bob Bray $26,174 in stimulus aid to fix a fence and replace the roofs on public apartments in Blooming Grove, Texas, a town of fewer than 900 people outside Dallas. He hired five roofers and an inspector to do the job. But the number of jobs he reported to the government looked very different — 450 jobs. "Oh, no," said Bray, who runs the local public housing authority part-time with his wife, Linda, when asked about the discrepancy. He said that he told the government that he had created six jobs but that a federal official told him that wasn't right. So he reported the number of hours the roofers worked instead. The Department of Housing and Urban Development caught the mistake, but he couldn't fix it before the jobs figures were published. "The money was great, but the reports are really confusing," he said. "I've been fighting with it for over a month and a half."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-11-02-stimjobs_N.htm

They claimed the repair of one fence and a few roofs created 6 full time jobs, but then reported to the public that they created 450 jobs in a town of 900 with a grant of $26,174. Four hundred fifty jobs for $26,174.

In Washington, that's being dismissed as "stimulus confusion". In the rest of the country, when you take government money and lie about what you did with it, it's called government contracting fraud.