Charleston, W.Va., received the bulk of the state’s created/saved jobs and dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This is according to the latest information posted on Recovery.gov.

Nine of Charleston’s 47 zip codes benefited from the stimulus with 1,426.7 jobs created and/or saved. 17 Charleston zip codes received approximately $410 million in total stimulus funding. Statewide the stimulus is credited with creating/saving 2,409 jobs and bringing in over $1 billion in federal grants, contracts, and loans to West Virginia.

When the numbers are crunched, Charleston received 40.79 percent of the state’s created/saved jobs and 61.12 percent of the total state stimulus funding. This works out to $283,911.65 for every created/saved job in Charleston. One Charleston zip code, 25303, managed to benefit from 89.2 created/saved jobs while receiving -$77,961.00.

Yesterday we reported about eight fake Congressional districts in West Virginia receiving stimulus funds and jobs (West Virginia Watchdog “BREAKING: Obama Recovery Act Increases W.Va. Congressional Districts by Eight!). The larger picture shows that this problem is also nationwide.

Reporter Bill McMorris with Watchdog.org compiled a list of the phantom districts which shows the phenomenon can be found in all 50 states, Washington D.C., and four U.S. territories. There are 440 total phantom Congressional districts nationwide receiving approximately $6.4 billion and creating/saving 28,430 jobs; that’s $224,500 per job. You can find McMorris’ full report at the end of this story.

According to reporter Michael Noyes with the Montana Policy Institute, the Obama Administration attributes these phantom districts to reporting errors and has no plans to correct these mistakes until the next reporting period in January.

“People make errors, and we’ve found people are making errors in these reports,” said Ed Pound, director of communications for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. “Our job is data integrity, not data quality.”

According to The Washington Examiner, 75,343 bogus jobs were created/saved nationwide. Reporters David Freddoso and Mark Hemingway have created an interactive map to show where these fake jobs are.

The map reflects reports from The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, the Sacramento Bee, The New York Times, USA Today, the Las Vegas Sun, the Detroit Free Press, the New York Post, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It remains a work in progress because relatively few newspapers have scrutinized stimulus spending so far.

The Obama administration has claimed that the $787 billion economic stimulus package “saved or created” some 650,000 jobs. But almost as soon as the White House trotted out this figure, news organizations found huge exaggerations in the reported data. Many of the jobs reportedly created do not exist or cannot be accounted for.

75,343 Bogus jobs ‘created or saved’ by the Stimulus | Washington Examiner