We evaluated the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) award process for the Neighborhood Stabilization Program 2 (NSP2). We initiated the review as part of the activities in our fiscal year 2010 annual audit plan. Our primary objective was to determine whether HUD’s methodology and controls for the evaluation and selection of applications for the $1.93 billion in NSP2 funds were in accordance with applicable requirements. We added a second objective to determine whether HUD included special conditions in the grant agreements of high-risk grantees.

HUD’s methodology and controls for evaluating and selecting the applications were in accordance with requirements in the notice of fund availability. HUD followed the required procedures for evaluating applications against threshold requirements, such as program eligibility, and then rated the applications that passed threshold requirements against the six rating factors. At each step, HUD applied quality control procedures to ensure that its decisions were correct and supportable. HUD then ranked the applications according to their scores and properly selected 56 for funding. We expanded our work to review the grant agreements for the 56 selected grantees and found that HUD included special conditions as required by the regulations.

There are no recommendations in this report since no reportable deficiencies were identified.