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BNY Mellon, Microsoft Offer Stimulus Reporting Software

Software to help state and local governments show how they're using taxpayer money.

The Bank of New York Mellon and Microsoft have collaborated on analytic and reporting tools to help state and local governments track the stimulus money they receive from the federal government and report what they do with it, both to the Office of Management and Budget and to their constituents.

State and local governments are due to receive more than $100 billion through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. But with that money comes strict reporting requirements to the federal government — the deadline for the first such reports is October 10 — and an obligation to tell taxpayers who are paying for this recovery how the money is being used. "Some people say this money is being being watched more closely than any other federal dollars before," says Mark Brown, managing director, municipal finance at BNY Mellon. "State and local governments have to report how the money was spent, how many jobs were created, and related metrics."

Microsoft has assembed some existing software for this package, such as its Windows Vista operating system; Office; Live Meeting; Project 2007; Visio 2007; SQL Server; Sharepoint collaboration, process management, search and document management software; and Excel. All together these software pieces are designed to track, measure and share information about stimulus funding. They'll provide executive dashboards and maps of stimulus-funded projects, such as new bridges.

BNY Mellon will provide project fund administration expertise, and its trustee services will feed into Stimulus360 for reporting purposes. "The value we bring is holding and investing project funds at the direction of the state and local government, dispersing payments to contractors, and providing record retention and imaging services," Brown says. "The state government will get money for a project, we'll hold that money, invest it at their direction, and then pay requisitions as they come in to the various contractors, and then we'll take that information from our trust accounting system and upload that to Microsoft's platform, and create an output that meets OMB's requirements and provides transparency for the citizenry."

BNY Mellon already has more than 45,000 state and local government accounts, Brown says, and holds 48% of the municipal corporate trust market in the U.S.

The end result of the BNY Mellon/Microsoft collaboration will be a "seamless and easy way for governments, who have such management responsibility around these stimulus funds and the need to spend it wisely while giving civilians visibility to where their money is going, to fulfill those obligations," says Colleen Healy, general manager, U.S. financial services at Microsoft.

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