GAO Report

DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

District of Columbiais Rent Establishment Policies and Procedures Need Improvement (GGD-78-50) May 17, 1978.

The report listed overall recommendations and eighteen unnumbered specific recommendations in the areas of public housing, urban renewal and utilities. For convenience in matching our comments with the report, we have numbered both the recommendations and our responses in the sequence as they appear on pages 35 through 37 of the report.

OVERALL RECOMMENDATIONS

The Mayor of the District of Columbia should direct DHCD to:

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Improve policies, procedures and practices for setting rents and utility allowances of public housing and urban renewal tenants;

Regularly monitor the rent setting and utility allowance process; and Improve documentation of rent actions, particularly under the urban renewal program, to insure control over the rent setting process.

Response

The department has taken corrective action to address each of these recommendations. Specifically, they have improved their policies, procedures and practices for setting rents and utility allowances, established systems to monitor the rent setting and utility allowance process and improved the documentation 4 of rent actions and rent review of

We

The General Accounting Office questioned our previous response on this issue, suggesting that changes in the regulations do not insure that the changes will be promptly and appropriately implemented (Page 38). have administratively established the practice of implementing rent changes when they are published in the Federa Register in compliance with the recommendation of the GAO report. The most recent rent change for the Section 8 rent subsidy program was published in the Federal Register on March 29, 1978, and implemented as the new rental rates in the Public Housing re-examination schedule effective July 1, 1978. The time involved in implementing such a change will be reduced in the future.