Item 32.1 on the Tuesday, June 28, 2016 city council agenda discusses the results of the city’s annual audit. It is marked “for notation only” meaning that council cannot take action after hearing of the problems.
Problems?
From the backup material:
• Financial Audit: A finding related to the City’s year-end closing procedures which were not adequately performed. Resulted in initial errors in year-end balances and required several audit adjustments and delayed the audit issuance.
• Grants Audit: Of the 8 housing projects selected for review by BKD, the City did not verify eligibility information for 3 housing projects within the past fiscal year. In addition, the City did not maintain and was unable to provide the tenant application files for one housing project, and therefore BKD was unable to verify the tenants’ eligibly and rent being charged to the tenant.
• Grants Audit: Of the nine housing project selected for testing by BKD, the City did not perform inspections of units as required on four housing projects during fiscal year 2015.
Let’s see: wrong, late, unverifiable, and uninspected.
Those are pretty strong words coming from our external auditor.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Do you know if these were HACEP projects, because they’re usually pretty good about keeping up with requirements like tenant records and inspections. If so, then I’m very mistaken about the agency.
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If ya’ll keep records on all the tenants, ya’ll might could git caught wif yer hand in the cookie jar en maybe git caught with illegal immigrants in there!
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Why hasn’t there been more public discussion and concern about this? KVIA reported last October that there were at least 82 known cases of over-income tenants living in public housing projects, and city council is just now discussing it nine months later. That’s unacceptable.
Are housing authority employees helping friends and family get discounted housing and rental assistance at taxpayer expense? Are employees taking money on the side for getting people deals on housing? There is no logical explanation for files not being kept. Were they destroyed to protect people who work for the housing authority?
This requires more than an audit. The agency needs to be investigated. This is just another local government agency run by highly paid people, who are not doing their jobs or who have total disregard for policies. The housing authority is currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build new housing when they can’t even properly manage what they already have.
http://www.kvia.com/news/audit-report-82-highincome-families-in-el-paso-living-in-public-housing/35601050
http://www.multifamilybiz.com/News/6123/El_Paso_Housing_Authority_Closes_Largest_Rental_As…
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