This bill, the HUD Payment Integrity and Accountability Act of 2026, requires the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to measure and report improper payments for project-based and tenant-based rental assistance. The Secretary must include a compliant improper payment assessment in the agency financial report for fiscal year 2027 by December 1, 2027, and create a detailed plan and timeline for testing and reporting improper payment estimates in the Tenant-Based Rental Assistance and Project-Based Rental Assistance programs.
The bill also requires HUD to notify the Inspector General (IG) within 60 days when certain large changes occur in a ZIP Code and county: if annual housing assistance payments or grants, or the number of owners/landlords/public housing agencies receiving assistance, increase by more than 100 percent in one year. Similar notice rules apply to Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) and CDBG for Disaster Recovery payments or recipient counts.
The IG must identify programs or areas where payments or participating providers increased by at least 400 percent over the prior five years and must audit those programs or areas to check compliance with improper payment testing and to detect potential fraud. The IG must also, before the Secretary’s deadline, certify whether the Secretary’s assessment methodology is statistically sound and whether the Secretary attempted required data draws and document collection.
Finally, the IG must conduct a separate fraud risk assessment focused on the roughly $50,000,000,000 spent annually on rental assistance. That assessment must include comprehensive data draws from HUD and third-party systems, identify barriers to reestablishing matches with the Treasury’s "Do Not Pay" database, and report how prior system enhancement funding was used to address improper payment rules.
No publicly available information on the bill’s specific implementation costs. The bill refers to about $50,000,000,000 spent annually on rental assistance but does not state how much the required testing, audits, or reports would cost.
The bill directs HUD to produce a compliant improper payment assessment, to plan and test payment integrity in tenant- and project-based rental assistance, and to give the Inspector General new authorities to identify and audit large local increases in payments or recipients. Supporters would point to the bill’s focus on measuring improper payments, improving data draws and analytics, restoring checks like Do Not Pay matching, and increasing IG oversight and reporting on fraud risk.
No publicly available information on opponents' views in the provided bill text or metadata.