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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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I was one of those complaining in the late 90's and forward about bad decisions in HUD funding. Complaintants were told the Mayor had an "in" with Washington and That they (HUD) were told not to continue investigations. Williamson threw HUD out of his office and then HUD tightened up. This was despite 17 years of unanswered findings that had accumulated and suddenly had to be answered. Does HUD base their issues on personalities?
HUD has to move money into the communities and sometimes it appears they look the other way when fraudulent actions occur.The Flint Area Investment Fund had problems going back years and both the state and HUD ignored them. It wasn't until Flint detailed the fraudulent actions that the state and HUD responded.
Here is an outrage with HUD in 2009 continuing to fund ACORN.
HUD funds to ACORN, others triple despite criticism
Updated 10/23/2009 10:32 AM |
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By Matt Kelley, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Federal funding for a housing counseling program carried out by local non-profit groups such as ACORN has more than tripled since 2002, even though it has been criticized by government auditors for failing to show results.
President Obama's budget calls for a 54% increase next year — $100 million in all — for the program, which helps people buy or refinance a home, prevent a foreclosure or find rental housing. The Senate agreed, while the House of Representatives suggested $70 million; final negotiations over the bill are pending.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been unable to provide much proof the program works, according to government reports, despite an increase in funding from $20 million in 2002 to $65 million last year.
The reports found:
• "At present there is limited evidence of the benefits of counseling in making homeownership more sustainable," according to a HUD-commissioned study in 2008 by consulting firm Abt Associates. Abt found that 23% of those completing foreclosure-prevention counseling in 2007 managed to stay in their homes.
• HUD's inspector general warned in 2006 that the department inadequately supervised counseling agencies and failed to sufficiently measure results. "Despite not meeting its expectations, HUD continued to propose increases in funding," the report said. HUD has improved training and performance reviews for the program and soon will release a new housing counseling handbook, department spokeswoman Andrea Mead said in an e-mail.
• Earlier this year, non-partisan congressional investigators at the Government Accountability Office reviewed consumer protections for elderly homeowners seeking reverse mortgages. The undercover probe found that none of 15 HUD-funded counselors provided all of the required information. HUD Assistant Secretary David Stevens responded in a letter that the department was making improvements including hiring "mystery shoppers" to test reverse mortgage counseling and report back to counselors' supervisors.
In an interview, Mead said the department continually reviews its grants to make sure recipients "are achieving the program's goals and serving the public interest. If organizations don't meet those program guidelines, they won't get funding."
None of the government reports singled out any groups that received federal funding for criticism. However, one of them — the ACORN Housing Corp. — drew national attention last month after conservative activists released undercover videos taken at several offices of ACORN affiliates, including in New York and Washington, where housing counselors gave advice on buying a house for a brothel. The employees worked for a program that gets HUD funding but were not paid with government funds, ACORN Housing spokeswoman Alyson Chadwick
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Mead said in an e-mail that HUD has no way of knowing whether the workers caught on the videos were involved in government-funded programs.
ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the third-largest recipient of federal housing counseling money, has received $10.5 million from HUD for housing counseling in the past decade. Since the videos became public, the House and Senate have voted to prohibit future federal funding of ACORN.
"The issue with ACORN underscores a much larger problem within our existing bureaucracy: All too often we don't know how taxpayer dollars are being spent and if they are being spent in the right way," said Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for one of ACORN's critics, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.
NeighborWorks America, a non-profit created by Congress to boost home ownership, is the largest recipient of HUD counseling funds. It has received $17.4 million in the past decade.
Officials from NeighborWorks and ACORN say they're confident the program is effective.
"We know it makes a difference. We know a well-informed consumer makes better choices," says Marietta Rodriguez of NeighborWorks. It's difficult to get complete information about results, she added, because "we're not always able to track everyone we touch."
Bruce Dorpalen, ACORN's housing counseling director, says that of more than 40,000 ACORN clients seeking help preventing a foreclosure in the past year, about 8,000 got favorable mortgage changes. He said 18,000 more are in the loan-modification process. "This is a success story that not enough people know about," he said.
The foreclosure crisis means HUD should provide more funding to help people at risk of losing their homes, says Alan Mallach, a housing expert at the Brookings Institution, a think tank that often takes liberal positions. "I don't think there's any substitute for getting more and better counseling out there," Mallach says.
Andrew Carswell of the University of Georgia, who studies housing counseling, published an academic study last month that found mixed results five years after counseling clients in Philadelphia bought a home. He says the program is well-intentioned but said some counselors "could use a little bit more oversight."
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Mon Feb 21, 2011 9:08 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Lately i have had former and current political figures remarking that HUD played a role in Flint HUD issues because of problems with their monitoring.
I am some what suspicious of this report, but I am including it because of the Detroit HUD connection.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
HUGE HUD BOMBSHELL: TAX FRAUD -- HUD steals
More HUD bombshells coming, and it seems the contemptuous stench is eerily ACORNish. Steal, cheat, lie, rip off the American taxpayer ...no worries, the Dems have you covered. HUD is Andrew Cuomo's baby -- perhaps New York will be spared from a Cuomo reign after all. Now that would be a blessing. Here from Big Journalism:
Early leak on the project-in-process by ACORN stingmeister James O’Keefe involving the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offices in Detroit and Chicago:
This time, there are no prostitutes involved, just a shady, and serious, tax-fraud scheme. The ploy involves the Obama administration’s 10 percent tax credit to first-time home buyers. The law says that the credit maxes out at $8,000 for an $80,000 home. But at the Detroit office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the rule seems open to interpretation. O’Keefe asks a staffer, What if I bought a place for $50,000, but the seller and I agreed to write down $80,000 as the purchase price?
Realizing that he had a major scoop on his hands, Shachtman then quickly posted an additional story today on the Wired blog:
Late last year, O’Keefe and fellow activist Joe Basel went into the Detroit and Chicago offices of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) with a hidden camera. They pretended to be scam artists, asking employees there to participate in a complex kickback scheme involving federal incentives for first-time home buyers. In the excerpted footage shown to me by O’Keefe, the staffers seemed only to happy to comply.
The law says that the tax credit maxes out at $8,000 for an $80,000 home. On the tape, O’Keefe asked a staffer, “What if I bought a place for $50,000, but the seller and I agreed to write down $80,000 as the purchase price?”
“Flip it any way you want,” the staffer replied.
What if the place is worth much less — like only $6,000?
“Yup, you can do that.”
I wish I could provide more details — like the names of the staffers, or the exact dates of the recordings. But O’Keefe showed me the tapes just once, and quickly. O’Keefe did mention, however, that he was surprised he was able to avoid the federal buildings’ security systems.
A HUD spokesman said he was unaware of the tapes — or of any ongoing investigations into fraud at the department’s Chicago or Detroit offices. “First I’ve heard of it,” said HUD’s Jerry Brown.
(more…)
Posted by Pamela Geller on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 05:50 PM in ACORN, SEIU: Democrat Racketeering Tools | Permalink ShareThis |
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Mon Feb 21, 2011 9:29 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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HUD IG Exposes More ACORN Fraud
View Discussion Last Updated: Fri, 09/24/2010 - 10:55am
As public funds continue pouring into ACORN coffers, a federal investigation reveals that the crime-infested community organization embezzled millions of dollars for “housing counseling” in the last year and destroyed documents to hide the fraud.
The scope of ACORN’s (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) money laundering is actually impossible to fully track, according to a scathing report issued this week by the Inspector General of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the government agency that gave the Chicago-based group more than $3 million in the last year to “counsel” troubled home owners.
However, investigators determined with certainty that ACORN violated HUD laws and policies by spending nearly 80% of its “housing counseling” funds to pay the salaries of its employees, even after they were terminated. Between 2008 and 2009, the scandal-plagued leftist community organization illegally used $2.5 million of the $3.3 million it received from Uncle Sam to help financially struggling homeowners, investigators found.
Additionally, investigators said that they could not determine what activities the ACORN employees performed for the money they received. Considering the millions of federal and non-federal dollars made available in 2008 and 2009, the group’s “inability to fully support salary expenses allocated to the HUD grant raises serious concerns about the integrity of those charges,” the report says.
Since 1995, HUD has awarded ACORN nearly $20 million in “housing counseling” grants despite the group’s documented history of corruption. Famous for voter registration fraud and embezzlement, ACORN was deemed a criminal enterprise after a congressional probe revealed the group engages in systematic fraud by laundering federal money to pursue a partisan political agenda and manipulate the American electorate.
When Congress cut a chunk of its federal funding late last year, ACORN simply changed its name in an effort to shed its criminal history and retain its public and private cash flow. ACORN affiliates from coast-to-coast — including New York and California — have broken away and assumed new identities in order to dump the group’s crooked reputation.
Fortunately, this didn’t fool HUD’s Inspector General who states in his report that the subject of his probe, ACORN of Chicago, now operates as Affordable Housing Centers of America. You can call a dog a pig, but it’s still a dog.
Judicial Watch has extensively investigated ACORN, its strong ties to President Obama, its intimidation tactics, involvement in the housing market meltdown and fraudulent voter registration drives. Click here to see public records and other documents involving ACORN scandals. A mere name change can’t possibly erase the history. |
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Mon Feb 21, 2011 9:47 am |
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00SL2
F L I N T O I D
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Mon Feb 21, 2011 10:04 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Flint Public Housing has long had abuses. In the Deborah Pellens lawsuit againdt FPHA, it was alleged they lied to HUD about the number of units actually repaired versus the number being billed to HUD. Directors gased up agency vehicles for vacations and a multitude of other issues. Some of this came up in the firing of a director before Carpenter took over. Part of the problem is wanting a racial preference in the hiring decision and that is why Carpenter left. He was the wrong color.
During the Williamson administration, complaints were made that employees stole housing authority materials for use in their side construction businesses. Downt Town Wood said he quit after after being asked to paint filthy and greasy walls without cleaning them. There are numerous complaints of mold and other problems in units that have not been addressed.
Millions of HUD dollars wasted by fraud and greed while public housing falls apart
Posted by Michael Laprarie
Published: January 28, 2011 - 7:06 AM
The Center For Public Integrity is reporting:
Even by Washington standards, $26 billion is a lot of money.
That's the amount spent by taxpayers annually to provide housing for needy Americans. But there's significant evidence that some of the monies have been poorly spent for years.
A joint investigation by ABC News and the Center for Public Integrity found that the Department of Housing and Urban Development has struggled to combat theft, corruption, and mismanagement in the more than 3,000 public housing agencies nationwide it funds, and particularly inside the 172 that HUD considers the most troubled.
The problems are widespread, from an executive in New Orleans convicted of embezzling more than $900,000 in housing money around the time he bought a lavish Florida mansion to federal funds wrongly being spent to provide housing for sex offenders or to pay vouchers to residents long since dead.
Despite red flags from its own internal watchdog, HUD has continued to plow fresh federal dollars into these troubled agencies, including $218 million in stimulus funds since 2009, the joint investigation found.
... investigations last summer uncovered allegations that the then-Philadelphia Housing Authority's executive director had spent lavishly on parties that included belly dancers, and had used more than $500,000 in housing authority funds to secretly settle claims accusing him of inappropriate sexual advances with female employees.
The same month as one of the alleged belly dancer parties, 12-year old Ebony Gage suffered a near fatal asthma attack that occurred after her mother says poorly trained Philadelphia housing authority inspectors failed to properly inspect her home for dangerous mold.
... Lawmakers like Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wonder how such problems could go undetected for years by HUD.
"We expect that the agency in Washington, D.C. ought to be making sure that every taxpayer dollar is spent in a responsible way. And it seems to me that we have not had that proper oversight," Grassley said.
How can these problems go undetected? Easy -- and for the same reason that a modern-day Josef Mengle could run a putrid prenatal death camp right under the noses of health and welfare authorities in Philadelphia.
To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, entitlements now come with their own set of civil rights. Because HUD programs provide housing assistance to a significant number of minorities, particularly in large cities, they cannot be questioned or publicly disparaged in any way. Doing so would be tantamount to raaaaaacism! or bigotry and may have the unpleasant effect of temporarily reducing the amount of funding that HUD disperses in low income housing assistance which cannot be allowed to happen, ever, under any circumstances.
Republicans are currently busy looking for serious ways to cut Federal spending. Investigating the numerous and continually ongoing claims of waste and fraud in Federal entitlement programs would be a good place to start, as would trimming the massive, bloated bureaucracy in place to manage those programs. Democrats have never been able to do this, perhaps because doing so would force them to admit that these programs often keep people mired in poverty rather than helping to alleviate it. |
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Mon Feb 21, 2011 10:12 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Judicial Watch | Fighting corruption & promoting transparency in ...A watchdog over our government, legal, and judicial systems, the site posts a summary of the court cases they are pursuing along with related news stories.
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Mon Feb 21, 2011 11:13 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Wed Feb 23, 2011 8:15 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Wed Feb 23, 2011 8:32 am |
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