Sneak Preview: GAO Urges Treasury To Improve ERA2 Reporting
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) The Department of the Treasury plans to update its public reports providing data on the second round of Emergency Relief Assistance (ERA2) funding to add language about the potential for recipients to underreport program data, in response to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
Congress appropriated $46.55 billion in two separate payments to the Treasury Department for the ERA program — $25 billion in December 2020 (ERA1) and $21.55 billion in March 2021 (ERA2) — to address financial and housing instability caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. ERA provides funding to state, tribes, territories, and certain local governments and the District of Columbia to offer financial assistance to eligible low-income households for rent, utilities and other eligible expenses. As of June 30, 2023, about 39 million (87%) of all ERA funds have been spent, and while the ERA1 program has expired, ERA2 funds must be spent by September 2025. The program is overseen by Treasury’s Office of Capital Access.
Treasury guidance requires ERA2 grantees to report expenditure, demographic and payment data on rental or utility financial assistance payments to eligible households. Treasury then publishes certain data each quarter from these grantee-submitted reports on the agency’s website through its ERA2 cumulative program data report (i.e., “public report”). The public report includes data on total obligations and expenditures by grantee, the total number of payments made to households, and the total number of households that received assistance by certain income levels.
GAO assessed the completeness of Treasury’s data in its public reports as of Feb. 2. As it had in a December 2022 report , GAO found that the agency had not collected complete ERA2 data, nor had it assessed the risk of improper payments. For example, in its 2022 report, GAO found that 20% of grantees did not report data on ERA1 or ERA2 payments made to individual households. In its most recent review, GAO found about 25% of ERA2 grantees did not report on ERA payments made to individual households served as of the second quarter of 2023. In total, these grantees received about $4.1 billion in ERA2 funds, which exceeds the federal threshold for risks of significant improper payments.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
Join us for our following Thompson Grants events:
Federal Grants Forum | June 26-27, 2024 | Columbus, Ohio
Thompson Grants Workshop: Audits | July 18, 2024 | Virtual Event
