The D.C. Housing Authority paid $2.5 million in assistance to ineligible sex offenders and noncitizens, a federal watchdog said in a new audit finding that the city lacked effective controls to prevent the improper spending.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general called on the city to repay the money.
The reviews were part of a Trump administration push to combat fraud and crime in public housing.
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Similar audits dinged Los Angeles and Chicago, though the District’s report card was worse than those when it came to sex offenders and ineligible immigrants.
The D.C. Housing Authority was dinged for deficiencies in criminal background checks and inconsistent verification of immigration status.
That included 13 people receiving assistance despite immigration statuses outside the eligibility rules, and another 178 whose eligibility couldn’t be verified because the city failed to enter correct information into the federal database used to check eligibility.
The inspector general at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which conducted the audit, said the housing authority was unclear on which immigration statuses were actually eligible for assistance, and lost access to the database for six months after a key employee retired.
The city blamed HUD, saying the department wouldn’t assist in getting back up and running on the database.
In the criminal review, the inspector general’s audit identified 29 people with criminal histories who were getting benefits. Some 17 of those were designated “lifetime sex offenders,” and 13 of them were improperly admitted to the program.
The 13 had collected $1.6 million over their time in the program.
The other four were designated lifetime sex offenders after having been accepted to the program.
Three of them have since been booted, the housing authority told investigators. The fourth was grandfathered in because they were part of the program before the rules changed in 2001.
“DCHA’s weak controls and lack of oversight around background checks undermine the integrity and safety of DCHA’s housing assistance programs,” the audit said. “Although DCHA reported taking corrective action on most of these cases after receiving referral information from HUD OIG, the gaps in documentation and the absence of ongoing criminal background screening raise significant concerns that DCHA will allow other sex offenders into its programs in the future.”
In an official response to the audit, Nicole Wickliffe, the housing authority’s interim executive director, acknowledged missteps but pointed to mitigating factors, such as HUD’s failure to help restore access to the immigration database.
“DCHA believes these and other actions show that DCHA is committed to obtaining program compliance, and instituting the change necessary to get there,” Ms. Wickliffe wrote.
She objected to being asked to repay the $2.5 million to the feds, saying it would drain resources from the city’s compliance efforts.
Ms. Wickliffe also disputed some of the immigration findings, saying two of the households identified accurately prorated their benefits to account for those eligible and those not.
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