Finding Text
Federal Agency: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Federal Program Title: Low Rent Public Housing
Assistance Listing Numbers: 14.850
Federal Award Identification Number and Year: FL080; 20223
Award Period: October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023
Type of Finding: Significant Deficiency in Internal Control over Compliance,
Noncompliance (Other Matters)
Criteria or Specific Requirement: The PHA must establish and adopt written policies for admission of tenants. The PHA tenant selection policies must include requirements for applications and waiting lists, description of the policies for selection of applicants from the waiting lists, and policies for verification and documentation of information relevant to acceptance or rejections of an applicant (24 CFR sections 960.202 through 960.206).
Condition: During the testing of the Low Rent Public Housing Program tenant files, certain special provision compliance deficiencies were noted as summarized below:
Waiting List New Tenants
The Housing Authority failed to follow and enforce it's ACOP in adding families to the waiting list. Rent Cafe was used for adding families to the waiting list. However, the Housing Authority could not verify the workflow in adding families to the waiting list upon receiving an application in Rent Cafe. Also, during the fiscal year, they noticed applicants were left on Rent Cafe, without pushing the application to Yardi. This resulted in those families not being properly selected from the waitlist.
Tenant Selected from the Waiting List
Number of Instances -- Finding
8 -- The housing authority failed to provide documentation showing date/time of the original application through Rent Cafe or any other alternate system.
7 -- The housing authority did not follow controls for selection of the families from the waiting list.
Questioned Costs: Undeterminable
Context: We were unable to test a sample of waiting list-new tenants due to the Authority not properly tracking new tenants. Out of 8 tenants files tested for selection from the waiting list, 8 files contained errors noted above.
Cause: The Authority failed to provide adequate monitoring and oversight of their waiting list to ensure compliance with HUD rules and regulations as well as their administrative policy.
Effect: The Authority is not in compliance with federal regulations regarding the verification of the tenants income and maintaining adequate documents per the compliance requirements.
Repeat Finding: No.
Recommendation: We recommend management review policies and procedures in place and develop work processes to ensure it is in compliance with the ACOP and HUD.
Views of Responsible Officials: There is no disagreement with the audit finding.