The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) audit committee meets next week, and their meeting packet is up at the TDHCA website.
A couple of things caught my eye:
An Internal Audit repor of the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), including that part of the program funded under the Recovery Act was released. In contrast to the recent audit of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, the WAP review found “WAP has effective procedures in place to predict, identify, and prevent program weaknesses at the subrecipient level.” Nevertheless, the audit makes several recommendations to improve administration of the program, including the creation of a centralized complaint database.
An internal audit of the Recovery-Act funded Tax Credit Assistance Program was also released. This audit was ‘clean’ with no findings, stating “The Department met all of the TCAP reporting requirements and is providing HUD with accurate, complete, and timely data.”
The audit meeting materials also include a copy of a February ‘needs assessment’ report on the NSP program. Sounding notes similar to the recent internal audit of the NSP program discussed here previously, the needs assessment warns of impending bottlenecks in the program, noting “There is one (1) FTE legal and a paralegal to handle approximately 1,200 closings in the short term and an estimated additional 1,500 to 2,000 closings over the compliance period.” The report concludes “In the opinion of the assessment team, the State of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA), its partner TDRA and their combined subrecipients requires immediate on-site assistance to successfully move their program forward,” and recommends an additional 3.5 FTEs of high-level Technical Assistance over the next 3 months.
In short: WAP – status good. TCAP – status excellent. NSP – facing challenges.
The recent NSP program reports highlight the ongoing need for the state and TDHCA to identify and/or obtain the resources necessary to ensure the NSP programs funds remain in Texas and benefit those for whom the program was designed.
