Federal Reports

We audited the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Office of Multifamily Housing Programs’ monitoring of civil rights compliance.  Robust monitoring for civil rights compliance is critical to HUD’s goals to support underserved communities.  Our audit objective was to assess the extent to which HUD monitored civil rights compliance in its program activities.

HUD and performance-based contract administrators (PBCA) perform minimal monitoring of civil rights compliance when conducting management and occupancy reviews (MOR) for multifamily properties due to (1) a lack of training and emphasis regarding civil rights monitoring and (2) contract issues with the PBCAs.  From April 1, 2021, through December 31, 2023, HUD and the PBCAs monitored civil rights compliance for only 12 multifamily properties from a statistical sample of 132 properties.  By performing minimal monitoring of civil rights compliance, HUD is missing opportunities to identify discriminatory practices or civil rights violations, thereby missing opportunities to report these concerns to the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity for resolution.

We recommend that HUD’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily Housing (1) implement training at the regional level to provide instruction on and stress the importance of monitoring civil rights compliance as part of the MORs conducted, (2) direct HUD staff to perform all required monitoring of civil rights compliance as part of the MORs conducted, (3) instruct the PBCAs to include the completion of the addendum B checklist as part of the MORs performed by the PBCAs, and (4) provide technical training to the multifamily property owners and management agents on monitoring for civil rights compliance as part of the MORs.

We reviewed the results of prior OIG and Government Accountability Office engagements that were relevant to the supplemental disaster and crop insurance funding provided by the American Relief Act, 2025. We identified areas with reported past weaknesses and recommendations that may provide Farm Production and Conservation (FPAC) agencies insight when disbursing funds allotted by the Act.

In an effort to increase transparency and accountability in the use of Federal funding in program activities, Federal law and guidance requires the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and its prime recipients to ensure that complete and accurate subaward data is posted on USASpending.gov.  We audited HUD to determine whether the prime award recipients of HUD funding met all of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) reporting requirements for their subawards on USASpending.gov, including the amount of the subaward and a description of the products or services provided.  

We found that HUD’s prime award recipients of the Offices of Community Planning and Development (CPD) and Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes (OLHCHH) programs did not always report their subawards of $30,000 or greater as required by FFATA.    Specifically, 25 prime awards in CPD programs and 10 prime awards in OLHCHH programs from 2 separate statistical samples of 70 prime awards made at least 1 subaward that they did not report to USASpending.gov.  Additionally, we found that 31 of 68 sampled subawards under the CPD programs were noncompliant with subaward reporting requirements, primarily because the subaward description was not adequate to provide the stakeholders with an understanding of the purpose of the awarded funds.   HUD’s prime award recipients lacked knowledge of the FFATA subaward reporting requirements due to insufficient guidance and oversight by HUD program offices and lack of an enterprise-level policy.  This noncompliance impairs the transparency and accountability of Federal spending, limiting stakeholders’ ability to fully evaluate the use of Federal funds within their communities.

The objective of our inspection was to review the U.S. Department of Education’s (Department) administration of its reasonable accommodation program. This included determining whether reasonable accommodation requests were processed timely and in accordance with applicable policies and procedures. We found that improvements are needed in the Department’s processing of reasonable accommodation requests. Specifically, we found that the Department did not always process employee reasonable accommodation requests in accordance with relevant policies and procedures or maintain adequate documentation to allow for a determination of whether it complied with these policies and procedures, including those related to processing timeframes. In addition, we found that the Department did not adequately process applicant reasonable accommodation requests to ensure that accommodations were only provided to applicants with a qualifying disability. We also found that the Department does not have adequate processes to track and report on reasonable accommodation requests. The processes used by the Department do not ensure that all requests are captured, that data specific to the requests is adequately tracked, and that data is properly reported. We also noted issues with the quality of the data included in spreadsheets used by the Department to track and report on reasonable accommodation requests.