(RTTNews) -  The White House revealed early Thursday morning that it takes issue with a story from the Associated Press that claimed the government had overstated the number of jobs created by the stimulus plan by thousands.

According to the Associated Press story, the Obama administration took numbers from a government oversight board report released several weeks ago that claimed the $787 billion stimulus package helped pay for more than 30,000 jobs. The Associated Press claimed that this number was overstated by at least 5,000.

"The data errors cited by the Associated Press - on about 5,000 jobs - are not significant to the total job count (of hundreds of thousands of jobs) that will be posted on Friday," the White House said.

The Obama administration had claimed that the 30,000 jobs meant that the stimulus package was exceeding early expectations in meeting President Barack Obama's goal of saving or creating 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

However, according to the Associated Press, which reviewed the numbers, some of the federal agencies or recipients of the stimulus money exaggerated the number of jobs created by the package, sometimes by as much as 10 times the actual number of jobs created.

As an example, the Associated Press said that a Colorado company had claimed that it had been able to create 4,231 jobs with help from the stimulus package, but the actual number was fewer than 1,000.
In response to this claim, the White House said that number had already been corrected "more than a week ago as part of the twenty-day review process and the change is in the final data posting being prepared for Friday."

Additionally, the Associated Press reported that officials at the East Central Technical College in Douglas, Georgia, have said they shouldn't have claimed 280 stimulus jobs linked to more than $200,000.

The White House, in response, said this item "which represents less than .06 percent of the total jobs reported was also already corrected more than a week ago as part of the twenty-day review process and the change is in the final data posting being prepared for Friday."

Ed DeSeve, Senior Advisor to the President for Recovery Act Implementation, said, "This story draws misleading conclusions from a handful of examples."

He added, "It looks at only a small portion of the data - an initial upload of data representing just two percent of Recovery Act spending - that was made publicly available before a full review of its accuracy could be done."

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