Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/report-faults-lax-oversight-of-treasurys-bailout-funds Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript A congressional panel has criticized the Treasury Department's oversight of the $700 billion financial industry bailout. The panel's report says the rescue funds have failed to alleviate the foreclosure crisis and the department has not kept a thorough record of spending. A senator explains the findings. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JUDY WOODRUFF: When Congress approved a $700 billion package to shore up the financial system, it did so with some conditions. Most importantly, the Treasury would be allowed to disburse the first half of that money, but would have to come back to Congress for the rest of it.It also required some oversight for monitoring the money, including periodic reports from a bipartisan congressional panel. That panel issued a tough report today.And here to walk us through the findings is one of its five members, former Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire.Senator Sununu, thank you very much for being with us. FORMER SEN. JOHN SUNUNU, R-N.H.: Great to be here. Thank you. JUDY WOODRUFF: So first of all, what did the panel learn about what was accomplished with that first $350 billion or so? JOHN SUNUNU: Well, what we did back in December, just before I joined the panel, was put out 10 different questions that anyone would want Treasury to answer. What have you done with the money? What kind of metrics are we using to decide if it's being used effectively? How are you tracking the performance of the banks, the financial institutions that received the money? And Treasury came back with their responses.So this report that we put out is the Treasury responses and then our evaluation of the responses. And there were some things that we can look back on and say are positive.I mean, the financial services system in America and across the world is much more stable than it was back in October, but there are still some big questions about how to measure performance.You know, how do we know, moving forward, that progress is being made? Do we measure overnight interest rates? Do we measure the three-month rate against Treasuries? So Treasury, first, needs to come up with good standards for measuring performance in the marketplace. JUDY WOODRUFF: And you're saying they haven't done that at all? JOHN SUNUNU: Well, they haven't really settled on key metrics that they'll track and that we will track, also, from month to month. And they should do that.Second, put together a system for monitoring compliance. You talked about the conditions, right, and some conditions on executive compensation. They can't pay dividends, the restrictions on share repurchases.How do we monitor all the different financial institutions that have received funds to make sure that they're complying with those basic requirements? And that really isn't fully in place yet either.