Loading the transparency dashboard
Each row below is a documented property of the source datasets as published — cumulative totals that are not frozen per modification, deleted transactions, deobligations, placeholder recipients, missing identifiers. These are characteristics of the data, not findings about any recipient, office or program. Every query in Glassbox VA applies the listed guard; the register records how much of the data each issue touches.
Scorecard computed Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:51:36 GMT · 9 issues · 6 active · 3 mitigated · 0 resolved
| ID | Issue | Rows affected | Dollars affected | Status | Guard applied |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US-1 | Cumulative award totals are not frozen per modification USAspending transaction rows carry cumulative columns (total_dollars_obligated, current_total_value_of_award, potential_total_value_of_award) that reflect the award as of the file build, not as of that modification. Reading them per row, or summing them, misstates award value. | 662 | $456M | Mitigated | Money is always the SUM of per-transaction deltas (federal_action_obligation, base_and_exercised_options_value, base_and_all_options_value) over non-deleted rows — app.award_current. Count = contract awards whose published cumulative obligation differs from the delta sum by more than $1; dollars = total absolute difference. |
| US-2 | Transactions deleted by later corrections Monthly USAspending delta files mark corrected or withdrawn transactions with correction_delete_ind = 'D'. A loader that ignores deletions double-counts corrected actions. | 400 | $10.5M | Mitigated | Deleted transactions are kept with is_deleted = true for audit and excluded from every total. Count / dollars = deleted contract + assistance transactions and their obligations. |
| US-3 | Negative obligations (deobligations) Modifications can carry negative federal_action_obligation — de-scopes, terminations, closeout returns. Some awards net to zero or below. | 363,081 | -$25.1B | Active | Negative deltas are summed as published (they are real). Detectors raise the negativeValues flag, which lowers evidence strength. Count = negative transactions; dollars = their total (negative). |
| US-4 | Aggregate and redacted recipients Awards to individuals are published under placeholder recipients such as "MULTIPLE RECIPIENTS" or "REDACTED DUE TO PII". They are real spending but not entities. | 11,936,863 | $2.6T | Mitigated | app.award_current.is_individual_recipient marks them; they count toward money totals but never toward recipient counts, recipient pages or entity detectors. |
| US-5 | Missing or placeholder UEI Awards before the April 2022 DUNS→UEI transition, and some exempt award types, carry no valid Unique Entity ID. Recipients then have to be grouped by name. | 1,647 | $296M | Active | Recipient identity falls back to the normalised name; detectors raise missingUei / nameOnlyIdentity, lowering evidence strength. Count / dollars = entity awards with no valid UEI. |
| US-6 | FY2016–FY2017 assistance files nearly empty The USAspending archive's VA assistance files for FY2016 and FY2017 are about 39 KB each, far smaller than neighbouring years. Grant totals for those years are likely understated until validated against the API. | 1,925,847 | $348.5B | Active | Fiscal-year charts show the gap as published; methodology copy flags it. Count = assistance awards whose first action falls in FY2016–FY2017; dollars = their obligations. |
| US-7 | Subaward reports contain duplicates FFATA subaward reports are self-reported by primes and are known to contain duplicate and restated rows; summing them overstates pass-through. | — | — | Active | Subawards are not yet loaded; no Glassbox VA total or detector uses them. |
| US-8 | SDVOSB self-representation vs. SBA certification The service-disabled-veteran flag on a federal award record is a self-representation carried from SAM.gov; only SBA VetCert certification (since January 1, 2023; VA's CVE before then) establishes eligibility for VA set-asides. | 2,862 | $5.9B | Active | The two set-aside detectors compare awards against sba.cert dates at the award's first action. Count / dollars = contract awards since 2023-01-01 flagged SDVOSB whose UEI has no SDVOSB certification in sba.cert. |
| US-9 | Exclusions without a UEI can only be matched by name Most SAM.gov exclusion records carry no UEI. Matching them to award recipients by name risks collisions between unrelated firms with the same name. | 1,013 | — | Active | The excluded-party detector prefers UEI matches; name + state matches carry the nameMatchOnly penalty and a name-collision note. Count = firm/entity exclusions with no UEI. |