Case study LA: how cities hide the failure of their homelessness spend
A blistering audit reveals the manifold ways (no uniform data standards or real-time oversight) that gov't and nonprofit organizations avoid basic accountability for how they spend taxpayer money. LAist uncovers the mess.
L.A. city officials have made it impossible to accurately track homelessness spending, in large part by outsourcing to an agency that has failed to collect accurate data on its vendors and hold them accountable, according to findings from an independent audit commissioned by a federal judge.
The problems heighten the risk of tax dollars being misspent, auditors found after reviewing $2.4 billion in city funding.
Many of the problems auditors identified were at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA. It’s the government agency, overseen by the city and county, that for decades L.A. mayors and council members have outsourced management of much of the city’s homelessness dollars for sheltering, feeding and serving people.
The report paints a blistering picture of a lack of accountability for taxpayer dollars in recent years.
"The lack of uniform data standards and realtime oversight increased the risk of resource misallocation and limited the ability to assess the true impact of homelessness assistance services."
There was "a high level of noncompliance" among the small number of service provider contracts that were reviewed, auditors added. And a lack of oversight, they wrote, has "made it challenging" to determine how program funds were used and "whether they achieved the intended outcomes."
County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath responded to the audit by calling LAHSA’s problems “a nightmare,” and announced that she will schedule a vote by county supervisors to pull county funding from the agency and instead have the county manage it directly.
“We cannot accept this dysfunction any longer,” Horvath said.
Elizabeth Mitchell, an attorney for the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, said the findings are "not just troubling — they are deadly.” The group’s high-profile lawsuit was the venue by which Carter initiated the audit.
“The failure of financial integrity, programmatic oversight, and total dysfunction of the system has resulted in devastation on the streets, impacting both housed and unhoused,” she said.
“This is not just mismanagement; it is a moral failure.”
The city is projected to send about $306 million in taxpayer dollars this fiscal year to LAHSA.
Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said the report confirmed what she’s been raising alarm bells about for years.
“We could never get clear answers about the tax dollars being invested in homelessness,” Rodriguez told LAist in an interview.
In a statement, Councilmember Nithya Raman said the audit findings “reinforce the need for real oversight and performance management of our city’s homelessness response.”
“ No one within the city is actually charged with tracking, how well are these programs working? Are our service providers doing what they're supposed to be doing? And how best can we spend our dollars?” she said.
Paying vendors through LAHSA, Raman added, has meant that at “the city, we don't have information that we need in order to make sure these dollars are being spent well, and that people on the streets are getting the help that they need.”
Read the whole thing here.
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