Tuesday January 30, 2007

Correction: On Monday, back payments of $23,341 were made, affecting 29 landlords and 48 tenants and 29 re-certifications were completed.

Landlord Payment Update - Monday Jan. 29

Every year, Section 8 Voucher recipients must "recertify" their eligibility to receive housing assistance. These are what we call "re-certs" and normally, we'd have just over 200 each month. As of Friday, January 26, that number had swelled to 618 re-certs that are awaiting action. As you can see, that's quite a bit of catching up to do.

Although the status of how many re-certs may not be a clear indicator, we can report out the dollars we're paying out in check runs that are now daily to meet demand. Normally, the Housing Authority pays out about $1.3 million in landord payments per month (in a single chec run at the first of the month).

Last Thursday, back payments totalling $80,589 were issued to 32 landlords, affecting 55 tenants.
Last Friday & Saturday, $76,652 in back payments was issued to 35 landlords, affecting 49 tenants.

These indicators will be updated daily.

So, What's the Plan?

The following is DHA's action plan to resolve payment backlog for Section 8 landlords:

• From Friday, January 26 through Friday, February 9, all Section 8 personnel will be exclusively working through the payment backlog, focusing completely on reconciling and paying past due accounts, processing and catching up on new move-ins, inputting and paying completed re-certification backlog and adjusting erroneous overpayments.
  In order to allow the staff to work on this exclusively, DHA will be taking these steps:
  
• With few exceptions (emergencies related to safety or eviction), all clients appointments scheduled during this time will be re-scheduled.
  
• Section 8 staff will not be available to the public to answer inquiries by telephone, fax or email.
  
• Management will post regular updates to this blog. This should help the public in monitoring our progress.The Section 8 staff will resume normal business hours on Monday, February 12, at which time the backlog should be cleared.

Landlord Payments

You've probably seen in the news recently that some of our Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) landlords are not getting their checks on time. This is due to a backlog created by our conversion to a new software that manages tenant and financial data.

Without a doubt, the Durham Housing Authority is entering a new era with this software. It will provide us with a level of realtime reporting that we've never seen, evenutally will allow clients to apply for housing online, and perhaps most important of all ... the system will not tolerate entry errors and very customized files.

And there's the hitch. The old (and we do mean OLD) system that we used did allow many non-standard entries into tenant and landlord files. Converting such data brought DHA to the familiar expression in computing circles -- we had what our MIS Director affectionately calls "a GIGO problem" -- Garbage In, Garbage Out. The solution turned out to be - re-enter.

We are committed to cleaning up this situation once and for all, which means we have to take some pains to check, to verify, to reconcile. We also have to account for how all of this is done for the benefit of passing the inspection of auditors and we still have ongoing resertifications and new applications for public housing to process. We're a busy bunch at DHA.

Now, this doesn't mean we've done the best job when it comes to letting our landlords know where we are in the process, so we're going to make a greater effort to be more responsive. Please check back here for more information and drop me a line (jbolduc@dha-nc.org) if you have specific questions.

Thanks for sticking with us, Durham!