The audit trail needs to be part of tracking all actions in all activities by all ARRA participants, much as Sarbannes-Oxley requires of corporate finance.  The audit trail must also be able to go to a management repository that is consistently applied by all participants, otherwise, the audit trail will be blocked, grow cold, or be misdirected, all leading to the potential for mismanagement, waste, abuse, and fraud.

Rebuilding Management's ERP system provides a complete financial audit trail as well as a fully documented RFP bid process at the task level.

The PRE-audit still remains the most powerful tool to prevent waste, fraud and abuse. We have to get away from the "pay and chase" model of auditing.

It begins at the CCR registration to ensure that companies are legitimate and the people working for them are free of fraud or criminal backgrounds.

While I agree that an audit trail is critical, these steps are already in place.  Additionally a key part of the ARRA is that every Federal Department or Agency that recieved funding to oversee and implement the distribution of stimulus funds also had monies allocated to their Office of Inspector General to make sure that there was clear accounting and audit trails for all of the stimulus funds.

Additionally GAO has been given wide reaching responsibilities to further ensure that the process is open and compliant.

 One of the other posts to this thread smacks of a vendor touting their product as a solution and that is unfortunate as the purpose of the National Dialogue is to promote the discussion of how information technology can be applied to increase the effectiveness and impact of the recovery, not as a forum to promote products.

The bigger issue behind having an audit trail is that there needs to be a way for the public to be assured that the money that has been distributed as part of ARRA is tied to results and that is why every Federal department or agency that is part of ARRA are required weekly to post their progress to http://www.recovery.gov.  It is just as important to see how the money was spent and how that contributes to the financial recovery as it does how much was spent.