The Gateway Pundit reported yesterday that there were some serious problems with the audit of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The article reports:

The 2015 and 2016 Fiscal Years HUD audit needed to be restated and reissued.  The auditors were not able to initially perform the audit because there were too many material issues and the audit needed to be redone –

…The restated audit report shows the following –

The total amounts of errors corrected in HUD’s notes and consolidated financial statements were $516.4 billion and $3.4 billion, respectively. There were several other unresolved audit matters, which restricted our ability to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to express an opinion. These unresolved audit matters relate to (1) the Office of General Counsel’s refusal to sign the management representation letter, (2) HUD’s improper use of cumulative and first-in, first-out budgetary accounting methods of disbursing community planning and development program funds, (3) the $4.2 billion in nonpooled loan assets from Ginnie Mae’s stand-alone financial statements that we could not audit due to inadequate support, (4) the improper accounting for certain HUD assets and liabilities, and (5) material differences between HUD’s subledger and general ledger accounts. This audit report contains 11 material weaknesses, 7 significant deficiencies, and 5 instances of noncompliance with applicable laws and regulations.

It’s time for HUD to straighten out its books. It might be a good idea to put someone with an accounting background in charge of the agency at least temporarily. The irony here is that if a business had financial records that were this much in error, its owners would be talking to the Internal Revenue Service and possibly sitting in jail.