From the Tuesday Morning Jolt, another cheerfully depressing tale of your tax dollars at work:
HUD Inspector General: We’re Wasting at Least $37 Million Per Month
The short version: To live in public housing, you have to meet a community-service or self-sufficiency requirement. A recent HUD Inspector General audit found that about 27 percent of the public-housing residents they checked weren’t meeting the requirement, amounting to $37 million per month going to residents who didn’t qualify for the subsidy.
The longer version . . .
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development runs public-housing programs to provide “decent and safe rental housing for eligible low-income families, the elderly, and persons with disabilities.” About 1.2 million American households live in public-housing units, managed by approximately 3,300 public-housing authorities.
HUD provides subsidies to public-housing authorities to assist in funding their operating and maintenance expenses.
To qualify for public housing, residents must meet a monthly “community service and self-sufficiency requirement.” Under the requirement, every nonexempt adult resident of public housing must contribute 8 hours of community service each month or participate in an economic self-sufficiency program — job training, employment counseling, work placement, basic skills training, and education.
Residents can be exempt from the requirements if they are 62 or older; blind or disabled, working, or in a welfare-to-work program.
A new Inspector General audit found “HUD subsidized housing for 106,000 units occupied by non-compliant tenants, out of nearly 550,000 potentially CSSR-eligible units nationwide. Out of the nearly 740,000 adult tenants living in these units, HUD’s system contained incorrect CSSR status codes for 201,000 tenants.”
That amounts to 27 percent of all adult tenants in those public housing units!
The report blamed HUD for not having adequate controls to monitor compliance with the community-service requirements, and estimated the department paid more than $37 million in monthly subsidies to residents who didn’t meet the requirements. That’s $37 million per month, every month, adding up to $444 million per year.
But wait, there’s more! The Inspector General’s office said the exact same thing . . . six years ago!
We issued audit report 2008-KC-0002, HUD Did Not Ensure That Housing Authorities Properly Administered the Community Service and Self-Sufficiency Requirement, on March 24, 2008. In that audit, we found that HUD did not have adequate controls to ensure that housing authorities properly administered CSSR. Specifically, HUD did not have sufficient guidelines, adequate data collection and reporting systems, or effective enforcement mechanisms. Of 68 statistically selected households, 44 did not comply with CSSR and were, therefore, ineligible for continued occupancy. Based on these results, we estimated that housing authorities improperly renewed or extended the leases of at least 85,000 ineligible households, costing an estimated $21.5 million in monthly operating subsidies.
What happened after the 2008 report? “HUD did not apply sanctions against housing authorities that failed to enforce CSSR compliance.”
Hey, I’m sure the Obamacare subsidies will work out a lot better.