At the request of the Office of Public and Indian Housing (PIH), we performed a limited review of a random sample of 112 March and April 2009 Disaster Housing Assistance Program (DHAP) payments for Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita evacuees. The objective was to verify whether the authorized tenants lived in the residences in March and April 2009.

Testing identified 20 instances of potentially ineligible payments totaling $9,478 and some other matters that warrant PIH's attention. The 20 payments were potentially ineligible because they were for tenants who did not live in their assisted units during March and/or April 2009 while their landlords were paid for those units for those months. Of the 112 samples, there were 14 potentially ineligible payments totaling $7,448 in March 2009 and six potentially ineligible payments totaling $2,030 in April 2009.

We recommended, and PIH agreed, that it would work with public housing agencies to determine the eligibility of the questionable payments and require repayment when appropriate. We further recommended, and PIH agreed, that it would help the public housing agencies develop controls and policies to ensure the accuracy of payments each month and identify when tenants vacated their units.