If you are a County government, and get a Federal grant from the US Dept. of Housing and Urban development (HUD), you better keep good records to show where you spent it.
Apparently the staff at Miami-Dade County flopped the accounting test, and had to repay $3.6-million. This is apparently in a long string of accounting screw ups in that County.
Watch out for those Federal audits, Lake County!
vj
Miami-Dade must repay $3.6M in Housing and Urban Development funds
BY MARTHA BRANNIGAN
mbrannigan@MiamiHerald.com
The county's latest problems with HUD -- which administrators unveiled at a County Commission meeting Thursday -- come just two years after the federal agency returned control of the troubled Miami-Dade Housing Agency to county hands after 15 months under HUD supervision.
The disclosure angered several commissioners -- particularly in view of unrelated financial woes at the Miami-Dade Transit Agency, which has seen all federal grant reimbursements stop after an audit found shoddy financial management and weak internal controls.
County administrators asked the commission to authorize the use of $3.6 million in general funds to pay back HUD, but the board agreed only to allow the use of $181,632 in such funds. Commissioners urged county executives to go back and look for other sources of money to repay the rest, which will come due over a three-year period.
``Taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill and pay back money that was wasted,'' said Commissioner Natacha Seijas, who urged the administration to go after those who received grants they weren't entitled to. ``Are we asking them for the money back -- or are they still enjoying it?''
Commissioner Rebeca Sosa, who chairs the board's new Economic Development and Social Services Committee, raised concerns that county executives hadn't informed the board about the problems with HUD much earlier and objected to the use of tax money.
``I don't want to settle for the general fund'' as a source of repayment, Sosa said. ``I want to look for alternative funds.''
The latest sign of shoddy oversight at the county stems from an audit completed in June 2009 by HUD's Office of Inspector General, which found a litany of concerns in Miami-Dade's use of federal Community Development Block Grants.
Among other things, the county couldn't show the federal grant money was used to create jobs and to improve housing for low-income and moderate-income people and to provide meals to elderly residents, as required by HUD.
Much of the grant money was overseen by the county's Office of Community and Economic Development -- now the Department of Housing and Community Development -- but other agencies also showed problems in handling the block grants.
Commissioner Carlos Gimenez said he was worried that shoddy financial oversight ``seems to be a recurring issue.''
Jennifer Glazer-Moon, director of the Office of Strategic Business Management, stressed that the county has shored up its monitoring of such grants. And, she added, the county succeeded in paring the total due to HUD to $3.6 million -- from the $4.7 million that the federal agency was originally demanding.
``We want to make sure things like this never, ever happen again,'' said Glazer-Moon.
The flap over federal Community Development Block Grant money echoes the deeper problems at the transit agency, which runs the county's sprawling bus and rail system.
A federal draft audit issued this month sharply criticized Miami-Dade Transit for shoddy financial management and insufficient internal controls -- including improper accounting for bus fare boxes and a failure to document how federal grant money has been spent.
The audit came two months after the Federal Transit Administration took the extraordinary step of suspending grant payments totaling about $182 million to the county-run transit agency.
On Thursday, Ysela Llort, the assistant county manager who oversees transit issues, told the commission that county officials are working intensely to resolve federal transit regulators' concerns as quickly as possible.
The county must respond to a draft federal audit by Feb. 7, the same time that FTA officials plan to return to Miami to assess the county's progress in fixing its problems.
``We have to respond to the FTA,'' Llort told the commission. ``We have to demonstrate that these issues have been taken care of.''
The county's previous problems with HUD led the federal agency to seize control of the county housing agency in 2008. Much of the county's housing problems were chronicled in a 2006 series in The Miami Herald, ``House of Lies.''
The county agreed to shore up financial controls, to get its books to conform with generally accepted accounting principles and to provide proper oversight of housing programs that had been abused, and it won back control of the agency in December 2009.
