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Report Fraud, Waste and Abuse
March 03, 2023
  • Community Planning and Development
2023-FW-0001

We audited the Office of Community Planning and Development’s (CPD) monitoring and oversight of the Community Development Block Grant - Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program.  The objective of the audit was to determine whether CPD had effectively and efficiently designed its CDBG-DR program requirements and monitoring to ensure that the grantees meet statutory and other Federal low- and moderate-income (LMI) requirements.  Generally, CPD had effectively and efficiently designed its CDBG-DR program requirements and monitoring to ensure that the grantees met the various LMI requirements.  Almost all (98 percent) of the closed grants met the requirements, and a majority (80 percent) of the active grants were meeting the requirements.  Of the 193 grants reviewed, 1 closed grant did not meet the requirements, and 28 active grants needed to budget funds to meet the requirements.  We identified opportunities for CPD to improve its monitoring and oversight of its grantees’ compliance with the requirements, such as (1) including an additional overall LMI benefit calculation in quarterly performance reports (QPRs) and (2) establishing budgeting benchmarks.  If CPD implements the recommended improvements, it could potentially prevent other grants from becoming noncompliant and reduce the number of grantees that need to budget sufficient funds to LMI activities.  The changes could also improve the accuracy of reporting.

Recommendations

Community Planning and Development

  •  
    Status
      Open
      Closed
    2023-FW-0001-001-A
    $666,666.00
    Questioned Costs

    Recommendations with questioned costs identify costs: (A) resulting from an alleged violation of a law, regulation, contract, grant, or other document or agreement governing the use of Federal funds; (B) that are not supported by adequate documentation (also known as an unsupported cost); or (C) that appear unnecessary or unreasonable.

    Closed on February 03, 2025

    We recommend that the Director of CPD’s Office of Disaster Recovery review the one grantee with a grant totaling $666,666 that did not meet the overall LMI requirement and address the noncompliance.

  •  
    Status
      Open
      Closed
    2023-FW-0001-001-B
    Closed on May 31, 2023

    We recommend that the Director of CPD’s Office of Disaster Recovery update DRGR’s QPR to include information on the progress towards compliance with the overall LMI benefit based on the total amount of the grant.

  •  
    Status
      Open
      Closed
    2023-FW-0001-001-C

    We recommend that the Director of CPD’s Office of Disaster Recovery adopt LMI benchmarking to ensure that grantees budget adequate funds to LMI at significant milestones in the grant lifecycle.

  •  
    Status
      Open
      Closed
    2023-FW-0001-001-D

    We recommend that the Director of CPD’s Office of Disaster Recovery make changes to the action plan process so that the action plan calculates an overall LMI percentage.