We reviewed the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Home Investment Partnerships Program as part of an Office of Inspector General (OIG) plan to improve HUD’s execution and accountability of fiscal responsibility. Our objective was to determine whether HUD’s proposed regulation changes and controls would mitigate the systemic deficiencies identified in prior OIG audit reports.

We found that if properly implemented, HUD’s proposed changes to HOME regulations and controls should mitigate the systemic deficiencies identified in prior HUD OIG audit reports with the exception of (1) the program office’s oversight of grantee monitoring and (2) validating the reliability of HOME data.

Office of Community Planning and Development (CPD) program officials’ oversight of field office monitoring and grantee compliance required improvement because the quality management review process they relied on failed to identify systemic monitoring flaws and officials did not use onsite monitoring data to assess monitoring efforts. As a result, officials could not ensure that monitoring was complete and effective and may have missed opportunities to identify systemic issues requiring corrective action, such as seldom or never monitored and longstanding noncompliant grantees.

Although CPD officials had improved controls over HOME data in the Integrated Disbursement and Information System, they lacked a complete process for validating the data. They focused their efforts on training, moving the database to a Web-based system, and implementing system controls to improve grantee compliance and data reliability. However, the HOME data were not fully validated, and the reliability of the data as a whole was unknown. With hundreds of grantees and thousands of subgrantees, reliable data are critical in overseeing the program, identifying high-risk grantees to monitor, and responding to public and congressional requests regarding the program.