Editorial: Errors have families seeing red

Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005 | 7:32 a.m.

This week's revelation of financial negligence at the Clark County Housing Authority shows how badly a few administrative errors can hurt dozens of families.

The Las Vegas Sun reported Monday that poor bookkeeping, program mismanagement and failure on the part of some employees to understand new guidelines for a federal rental assistance program resulted in a $1.5 million deficit and left at least 40 families without the help they had been promised. And other families may stop receiving help paying their rent in early 2006 if the agency can't offset the debt.

The Clark County Housing Authority is in charge of the federally funded Section 8 program that offers low-income families and individuals vouchers that pay most or all of their rent. This allows people to choose their own apartments based on their needs, such as transportation to work, school or medical care.

But in August Carl Rowe, the agency's interim executive director, discovered bookkeeping problems dating from January that resulted in the agency issuing hundreds of rent vouchers for which it had no budget.

Part of the problem stemmed from funding changes that the federal government made last year. Rather than paying the local housing authority for all of the vouchers it issues, the federal government now gives each authority a set amount of money from which to fund the vouchers.

But Clark County Housing Authority workers misunderstood the changes and issued vouchers according to the old system, running the agency into the red month after month. In August alone, the Sun reports, the authority paid out $743,000 more than it received.

Additionally, these employees accepted into Clark County's program hundreds of families who had been issued Section 8 vouchers in other parts of the country, but didn't bill the housing authorities in those areas.

And, finally, authority workers weren't monitoring voucher recipients and ejecting from the program those who broke such rules as failing to report new income or allowing other people to move in with them. Rescinding rule-breakers' vouchers can make them available to people who have been waiting for months or even years. The Clark County Housing Authority has about 450 families on its waiting list.

Rose made the right decision in first firing the employees involved in the failures. The authority then kicked rule-breakers out of the program and held off on issuing vouchers to about 40 families who were about to receive them, thus reducing the entire shortfall to about $300,000 at this point.

The agency is expected to be operating in the black by March -- presumably with better oversight and a staff that possesses a better understanding of the program and is more diligent in its duties.