Overview
In accordance with Section 12 of Chapter 11 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the Office of the State Auditor has conducted a performance audit of certain activities of the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) for the period July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2018.
We conducted this performance audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.
Below is our audit objective, indicating the question we intended our audit to answer, the conclusion we reached regarding the objective, and where the objective is discussed in the audit findings.
To achieve our audit objective, we gained an understanding of DHCD’s internal control environment related to our objective by reviewing applicable laws and agency policies and procedures, as well as conducting inquiries with DHCD management. We evaluated the controls over the administration of the EA program.
We randomly selected a sample of 450 applications at the nine DHCD field offices from pregnant women and families applying to the EA program. We tested the operating effectiveness of controls over the intake process by verifying that a homeless coordinator and a supervisor had signed off on the determination of whether each pregnant woman or family was eligible for the EA program.
DHCD uses All Service Integrated System Tracker (ASIST), a case management database where all applicants’ data are stored, for the EA program. To assess the reliability of the data we received from DHCD related to the EA program shelter addresses, we obtained from DHCD a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that contained the relevant shelter address information from ASIST. We tested the spreadsheet for duplicates and for missing and hidden data fields. We believe the spreadsheet was substantially complete based on the control test and visits to shelters, but could not validate that it contained all shelter addresses. We believe the data to be sufficiently reliable for the purpose of this audit.
We also performed the following procedures.
- We received a list of all 44 shelter contractors with which DHCD had contracts during fiscal years 2017 and 2018 to provide shelter accommodations and case management services to pregnant women and families in the EA program. We then reviewed all of the contracts to determine whether the scope of services detailed therein was consistent for all 44 shelter contractors. The services required in the contract established contractor goals, intake and case management services to be performed, rehousing and stabilization services, facility upkeep requirements, program requirements for staffing and hours of operation, and operational guidelines. Operational guidelines included how to deal with vacancies, rules for pregnant women and families, procedures for recordkeeping, and information about contract monitoring performed by DHCD.
- We reviewed DHCD’s policy for the placement of a pregnant woman or family in a shelter when a woman or family member is a registered sex offender. This policy was implemented and then updated in 2006. DHCD lists this policy for employees to follow on its website under “Housing Stabilization Notices.” We interviewed DHCD management to determine whether EA program shelter contractors were notified when registered sex offenders were placed at their shelters so they could inform other pregnant women and families at the shelters that sex offenders were living and/or working there. From the shelter address data obtained from DHCD we identified the 929 street addresses for all shelters in the EA program. We asked the Boston Police Department’s Sex Offender Registry Unit to match a list of 8 EA program shelter addresses against its own Sex Offender Registry Information database of registered level 2 and 3 sex offenders.
- We judgmentally selected a random sample of 60 EA program shelters to visit from a population of 929 shelters. We interviewed DHCD management to determine whether monitoring was performed at EA program shelters to ensure that they were safe and habitable for pregnant women and families in the EA program. To test whether DHCD monitored the ongoing condition of, and services provided at, EA program shelters, we visited shelters to observe their upkeep and spoke with pregnant women and families in the EA program to determine whether they were receiving the necessary assistance from shelter contractor caseworkers in finding stable and permanent housing as stipulated in the “Scope of Services” section of the shelter contractor contracts.
- We reviewed all annual shelter inspection reports on inspections performed by DHCD compliance coordinators (inspectors) for the period July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2018 to determine whether EA program shelter facilities were monitored and whether inspection findings were addressed by shelter contractors. We compiled the information from the Microsoft Word document inspection reports and organized it in Microsoft Excel to identify the shelters visited, the dates inspections took place, and the key findings from each inspection report. We determined that the inspectors performed 563 annual inspections during the audit period.
- We examined shelter contractor reports to determine whether evaluations were performed by DHCD contract specialists annually. DHCD keeps the list of the 44 shelter contractors on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing the relevant shelter information from signed contracts. We verified the information on this spreadsheet by looking for duplicates and missing fields. We selected a nonstatistical random sample of 20 providers (10 per year for fiscal years 2017 and 2018) out of a population of 44 and reviewed the annual evaluation reports to determine whether DHCD had effectively assessed the contractors’ performance.
Where sampling was used, we used nonstatistical sampling and therefore could not project the results of our testing to the overall populations.
| Date published: | August 28, 2019 |
|---|