House mittee on Oversight and ernment Reform Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA) characterized a report released by the ngressional Oversight Panel entitled, "Assessing Treasury′s Strategy: Six Months of TARP" as a wake-up call for the Administration to immediately institute means to properly and aurately value toxic-assets.

"This diagnosis of the financial crisis is driving the Administration′s aggressive interagency effort to revive credit markets and strengthen the balance sheets of financial institutions through capital injections and the removal of toxic assets," the report reads. "Yet this approach assumes that the decline in asset values and the acmpanying drop in wealth across the untry are in large part the products of temporary liquidity disunts due to nonfunctioning markets for these assets and, thus, are reversible once market nfidence is restored."

"Assumptions that the Treasury Department has made regarding the depth and severity of the financial crisis have called into question the direction they have chartered in their attempts to address the financial crisis," Issa said. "After two administrations and six months, we are still meeting resistance from the Administration on implementing a mmon platform that would allow us to track TARP dollars and value toxic assets – something this report characterizes as crucial to the suess of our efforts to address the current enomic crisis."

At a hearing last month of the Oversight and ernment Reform mittee, Rep. Issa pointed to a mmon reporting format such as XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) to greatly improve transparency. XBRL is in place as a reporting standard in approximately 40 untries around the world, including China. Banks are currently required to disclose information to the FDIC in XBRL format, and the SEC recently approved a final rule mandating the use of XBRL for all public mpanies reporting, with some mpanies required to mply starting in June of 2009.

"As this report notes, transparency is one of the historical precedents that determine the suessful resolution of a financial crisis," Issa noted. "We have the means available to show the taxpayers how their money is being used, while providing measurable results—namely, determining whether the money achieved what it was intended to achieve."

The report also characterizes the Treasury Department′s decision to limit the number of fund managers for the PPIP, and the eligibility criteria for fund managers as "open issues that need to be addressed in-depth in future Panel reports."

Rep. Issa sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Enomic uncil Director Lawrence Summers regarding the framework established by the Administration for the Public Private Investment Program (PPIP).