Treasury Website Redesign Breaks Bailout Links, Watchdog Says
A redesign of the U.S. Treasury Department’s website broke hyperlinks and moved documents that detail the department’s work on U.S. taxpayer bailouts, the chairman of a congressional watchdog said.
The redesigned site has “relocated thousands of documents critical to oversight, rendering it difficult -- and in some cases even impossible -- for oversight bodies, outside experts or the public to review Treasury’s work,” Ted Kaufman, chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, wrote in a March 7 letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.
Users trying to follow links from past panel reports were directed to the Treasury’s home page instead of the appropriate document, and “countless” links from other oversight bodies, newspaper websites and Internet users were broken, Kaufman wrote.
Tim Massad, Treasury’s acting assistant secretary for financial stability, responded in a March 14 letter that “it is our understanding that at this point all problematic links have been addressed.”
The Treasury has “already implemented a number of changes to the site, including a new page explaining site changes,” Massad said. “We will be making additional adjustments in the near future.”
“This is an extremely commonplace occurrence during website redesigns when pages are reorganized to better display information,” Treasury spokesman Mark Paustenbach said in an e- mailed statement yesterday. “All of these reports and documents remain easily accessible on Treasury’s public website.” He said the department worked with the panel “on this issue every step of the way.”
The letters were part of an oversight panel report reviewing the Treasury’s handling of TARP.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ian Katz in Washington at ikatz2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Christopher Wellisz at cwellisz@bloomberg.net
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