We audited HUD's process for monitoring recipient reporting for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act). The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (Board), created by the Recovery Act, has required the Inspector General community to evaluate Federal agencies' process for monitoring recipient reporting of Recovery Act funds for the quarter ending September 30, 2009. The audit reports are to be issued to their agencies no later than October 30, 2009. The reports will also be submitted to the Board, which will compile the results and issue a consolidated report with recommendations for improvement across the Federal government. Our audit objective was to determine whether HUD had developed a process for performing limited data quality reviews of recipient reporting of recovery funds.

We found that HUD has made progress in the quality assurance process. HUD has established a Recovery Implementation Team that has developed Department-wide policies and procedures and provided guidance to HUD program offices. The Recovery Implementation Team has developed a process for performing limited data quality reviews of recipient reporting of Recovery Act funds. The team has also developed procedures to identify and notify the recipients of the need to make appropriate and timely changes to data submissions. HUD has begun reviewing data reported to FederalReporting.gov by recipients and identified possible data errors that require follow-up.

We also found areas that HUD needs to address, specifically, (1) not all prime recipients have filed all of the required quarterly reports, (2) HUD has not ensured that the prime recipients review the data submitted by subrecipients, and (3) HUD has not developed a process to identify subrecipients that demonstrate systemic or chronic reporting problems and/or otherwise fail to correct such problems as identified by the primary recipients.