Though Warren became a hero for her pursuit of transparency, she hasn't been forthcoming. Warren's TARP panel under scrutiny

Elizabeth Warren became a hero of the left for her unrelenting pursuit of accountability and transparency with big banks and Wall Street firms that took billions of dollars in federal bailout money in 2008.


But when it comes to how her own bailout watchdog committee spent more than $10 million in taxpayer money, Warren has been a lot less forthcoming.

Warren, who is seeking the Democratic Senate nomination in Massachusetts to take on Republican Scott Brown, has yet to break down exactly how her congressional panel spent the money on travel expenses, meals and consultants, and the panel never revealed how much Warren was paid while she served as chairman.

The Congressional Oversight Panel, which existed for more than two years, has not yet disclosed any other staff salaries either — even though the five-member panel was created and run by Congress, where nearly every staffer salary and office expense, from plane tickets to bottled water, is publicly available.

In fact, Warren opposed GOP efforts to draft a budget for the bipartisan oversight panel, despite telling The Associated Press in 2008 that she wouldn’t buy a winter coat without a spending plan.

Warren declined to be interviewed for this story, and a spokesman for her Senate campaign insisted that the oversight panel had been transparent in its operations. However, late Wednesday night, the spokesman said Warren had reversed her position and now supports opening up all the committee records to public scrutiny.

“The Congressional Oversight Panel was responsible for overseeing hundreds of billions of dollars in TARP spending and was recognized for its strong return on investment, saving taxpayers billions of dollars,” said spokesman Kyle Sullivan. “The panel followed all reporting requirements set up by Congress and publicly disclosed its budget and spending information to Congress and in published reports.

“Now that the panel has completed its work, Elizabeth supports public access to its records.”

Warren did have to report her income from the panel on separate executive-branch disclosure forms — a total of $64,289 from 2009 to 2010 – when President Barack Obama appointed her as a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. While Warren worked on the panel during the last two months of 2008, she did not report any income that year because she was paid in 2009, Sullivan said Thursday.

Still, members of the public would not be able to find her panel salary unless they cross-referenced it with her executive disclosures, which are available through the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

Under the Troubled Asset Relief Program law, members of the oversight panel were paid for each day they worked at the same salary as a Cabinet secretary, roughly $200,000 a year, though the number of days they worked has not been disclosed. And panel members could hire and pay staffers whatever salary they deemed appropriate.

Warren stepped down from the oversight panel in September 2010 to help launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But Obama passed her over for the permanent director job when it became clear Republicans would block her Senate confirmation.

The COP, designed to oversee the $700 billion TARP, was disbanded this past March as the financial bailout effort wound down.

Congress gave the oversight panel a broad role in ensuring the Treasury Department was managing TARP funds appropriately. Passed by Congress in 2008, TARP didn’t require Warren’s oversight panel to provide a budget, nor did it limit the amount of money it could spend.

The oversight panel ended up issuing 30 reports on the TARP program during its 27-month existence. Warren was criticized by some for using her position to publicly push her own views on the financial crisis and how government should react to such situations, although the oversight panel also won plaudits from many in the financial community and from liberals for its aggressive pursuit of banks.

Sullivan declined to say why Warren opposed greater transparency while serving on the committee. And Warren’s critics are still upset about the lack of accountability on how the oversight panel spent its funds.

“For an entity whose purpose was to disclose where government funds went through the bailout, it is very disturbing that they [the oversight panel] did not disclose how they spent the money, much less simple and basic things that I asked about in a hearing a few years ago, like making public a telephone number for citizen watchdogs to call in, to disclose some very basic things on the website, which they never did,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a member of the Financial Services Committee who pressed Warren on this issue repeatedly. “It showed more incompetence than anything else. But it raises concerns about how she led that government agency, especially one in terms of getting [the public] disclosure on TARP.”

From October 2008 to March 2011, the TARP oversight panel received nearly $10.5 million in taxpayer money from Congress, public records show. In its final public report issued in March, the panel broke down expenses into general categories, including $8.7 million for salaries and benefits, and $768,851 for printing costs. But line-by-line itemizations have not been released to the public or lawmakers.

During the period that roughly corresponded with Warren’s tenure on the committee, the panel spent about $8.3 million.

Nearly a year after the panel’s creation, Warren and two other Democrats in the group blocked efforts by the two Republican members – Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling and former New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu – who wanted to draft a budget and release transcripts from meetings to the public, sources familiar with the oversight panel internal operations said.

“From the very beginning, several panel members strongly recommended that a clear budget be established, and that it would be the right thing to make that public,” said one such source. “Warren had no interest in setting a budget, even as a target, no interest in disclosing even to members of the panel how much was being spent and no interest in disclosing even to members of the panel what the money was being spent on.”