Three of the nation’s largest public housing authorities improperly admitted lifetime registered sex offenders, failed to properly verify immigration status and allowed millions of dollars in federal housing assistance to flow to ineligible participants, according to a series of federal audits that also expose weaknesses in the federal government’s own screening system.
The findings involve housing authorities in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C., and collectively account for more than $4.3 million in improper payments, according to an October 1 press release from the Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General.
But the two-page announcement only tells part of the story.
The three underlying audits, released September 29, document problems ranging from improperly admitted lifetime registered sex offenders and unverified immigration statuses to thousands of unresolved identity-verification deficiencies. In Chicago, the housing authority also continued paying for supplemental police services for years after the underlying agreement had expired.
At the same time, the reports reveal an uncomfortable complication for HUD: In some cases, federal auditors found prohibited participants using information from a federal database that local housing authorities themselves could not access.
In other words, some housing authorities failed to catch people they should have caught. In other cases, the federal government appears to have given the auditors a better flashlight than the people responsible for doing the screening.
33 Lifetime Sex Offenders Improperly Admitted
Across the three authorities, HUD OIG identified 33 people whom auditors said were already subject to lifetime sex-offender registration requirements when they were improperly admitted to federally assisted housing.
The Los Angeles audit, report 2026-LA-1005, found that the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, or HACLA, provided at least $770,701 in housing assistance to 15 tenants whom OIG determined were ineligible because they were subject to lifetime sex-offender registration requirements when admitted.
Auditors also identified 18 tenants whose lifetime-registration status HACLA could not verify at admission and eight tenants who became lifetime registered sex offenders after entering the programs.
The latter category exposes one of the broader regulatory problems identified by OIG: federal regulations prohibit the admission of lifetime registered sex offenders, but the federal framework does not simply require housing authorities to continually rerun the same admission-level check after a tenant has entered the program.
Chicago had similar problems.
The Chicago Housing Authority audit, report 2026-CH-1003, found five lifetime registered sex offenders had been admitted to CHA programs. Auditors also examined 59 household members and found required post-admission criminal-background checks had not been performed for 14 of them.
In Washington, the D.C. Housing Authority audit, report 2026-FO-0007, identified 17 lifetime registered sex offenders participating in assisted-housing programs. Thirteen, according to OIG, had been improperly admitted despite already being subject to the lifetime-registration prohibition.
HUD paid more than $1.6 million in housing assistance associated with those 13 participants.
The findings are serious. But the audits also reveal that the screening machinery used to produce them is not nearly as tidy as the government’s press release might suggest.
The Auditors Had a Database the Housing Authorities Didn’t
In Los Angeles, OIG reviewed a population of more than 98,000 tenants. But HACLA challenged significant portions of the audit findings, including some conclusions involving lifetime sex offenders.
One reason is particularly noteworthy.
Federal auditors had access to the FBI’s National Sex Offender Registry. Housing authorities conducting their normal screening do not necessarily have access to that same restricted information and instead rely on publicly available systems and other screening resources.
That distinction matters because records visible to federal auditors may not produce the same result in the public-facing systems available to a housing authority.
The Los Angeles audit therefore does something unusual for an accountability report: it documents failures by the local authority while simultaneously exposing limitations in the federal screening structure under which the authority operates.
The same issue surfaced in Chicago.
HUD OIG concluded that CHA had improperly admitted five lifetime registered sex offenders, but the audit’s findings and recommendations distinguish cases based on the information that had actually been available to the authority.
This is not merely an academic database dispute. HUD is asking local housing authorities to enforce federal eligibility restrictions. If the federal government possesses information necessary to identify a prohibited applicant but the agency conducting the eligibility determination cannot reliably see that information, the screening system has a structural blind spot.
That does not erase the local failures identified by OIG. It does raise the question of why HUD’s screening system allows such a blind spot to exist.
Nearly 2,000 Unresolved D.C. Identity Deficiencies
The D.C. audit presents perhaps the most substantial evidence that these problems extend beyond a few badly screened applicants.
OIG found 1,973 unresolved identity-verification pre-screening deficiencies in HUD’s Enterprise Income Verification system. DCHA could not demonstrate that the affected participants remained eligible because required reexaminations had not been completed.
Auditors separately found 157 failed identity-verification cases that had not been corrected within the required timeframe, with some remaining unresolved for more than seven years.
That distinction is important. HUD OIG’s October 1 press release compresses the identity problems into a short summary, but the underlying audit provides a more precise picture: the nearly 2,000 unresolved pre-screening deficiencies and the years-old failed identity cases are related program-integrity problems, not simply one interchangeable pool of records.
Immigration verification produced another set of problems.
OIG found 13 DCHA participants with ineligible immigration status who benefited from more than $869,000 in housing assistance. Another 178 participants could not have their immigration status verified because DCHA failed to enter their immigration identifiers into the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system.
The problems did not emerge from nowhere.
In February, months before the final OIG audit was published, DCHA publicly acknowledged an ongoing HUD-directed immigration-status compliance review. The authority said HUD had required public housing authorities nationwide to verify compliant immigration status for families in federally funded programs.
DCHA said it had repeatedly sought required records from third-party managers overseeing mixed-finance properties and, as of February, was still seeking documentation from managers of 23 properties.
The authority’s own statement therefore independently establishes that immigration-status verification and incomplete documentation were active compliance issues well before OIG published its final findings.
Chicago Paid Millions Under an Agreement That Expired in 2018
Chicago offers a different flavor of federal housing oversight.
The CHA audit found that an intergovernmental agreement with the City of Chicago for supplemental police services expired in 2018.
The payments did not.
According to OIG, CHA continued paying millions of dollars annually for supplemental police services after the agreement expired, including nearly $7 million in 2025 alone, without ensuring that all of the terms of the expired agreement were being met.
The October press release puts the amount paid under the expired arrangement at nearly $12.5 million.
OIG did not characterize the entire $12.5 million as an improper payment, an important distinction from the $4.3 million in improper housing-assistance payments highlighted elsewhere in the release. Instead, auditors concluded that operating under an expired agreement without sufficient oversight created a risk that CHA was not efficiently using resources intended to reduce violent and drug-related crime and improve resident safety.
The explanation was remarkably bureaucratic.
According to OIG, leadership changes at CHA and the Chicago Police Department, negotiations stretching over the years and a lack of prioritization by previous leadership contributed to the failure to execute a new agreement.
The police apparently kept policing. The invoices apparently kept arriving. The agreement, meanwhile, had been dead since 2018.
These Problems Predate the October Press Release
The findings were also not discovered in the few days preceding HUD OIG’s announcement.
On May 14, OIG published interim results from the three ongoing housing-authority audits, saying its early findings indicated weaknesses that could allow ineligible tenants to participate in public housing and voucher programs.
The interim review went beyond the conduct of the three housing authorities. OIG was already considering regulatory and procedural changes HUD itself could make to improve eligibility screening and crime-prevention controls.
Then, on September 24, five days before the three final authority audits were released, OIG published a separate review of HUD rental-assistance requirements involving criminal activity and immigration status.
That review found that requirements differ among HUD programs. OIG recommended that HUD assess those differences and take steps to promote more consistent implementation where appropriate. It separately found variations in immigrant-eligibility requirements and said clarification may be necessary to support consistent application.
That broader review makes it difficult to reduce the September audits to a simple story of three housing authorities ignoring perfectly functioning federal rules.
The local failures are documented. So are weaknesses and inconsistencies in the larger federal framework.
Los Angeles Had Just Received a 99 Percent HUD Rating
Perhaps nothing illustrates that tension better than Los Angeles.
In May, HACLA announced that HUD had awarded its Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program a 99 percent score under the Section Eight Management Assessment Program, placing the authority in HUD’s “high performer” tier.
HACLA said the assessment evaluates such functions as waiting-list management, income verification, housing inspections, compliance with federal regulations and program integrity.
Four months later, another arm of HUD published an audit saying HACLA had provided at least $770,701 in housing assistance to 15 tenants who were ineligible because of lifetime sex-offender registration requirements, improperly calculated assistance involving ineligible noncitizens and needed better eligibility controls.
Both things can technically be true because HUD’s performance assessment and an OIG audit measure different things.
That may be the problem.
A federal oversight system capable of awarding an authority a 99 percent performance score while a separate federal audit is uncovering significant eligibility failures deserves scrutiny of its own.
The Failure Wasn’t in One Place
The easiest reading of HUD OIG’s October 1 announcement is that three large housing authorities failed to follow the rules and taxpayers lost millions.
The underlying records paint a less convenient picture.
Housing authorities did make consequential errors. Staff mistakes occurred. Required checks were missed. Immigration verification was incomplete. An expired Chicago police-services agreement remained functionally alive for years. D.C. accumulated a substantial backlog of unresolved eligibility and identity issues.
But auditors also encountered limitations in the federal information available to housing authorities, inconsistencies among HUD program requirements and gaps that OIG itself believes HUD should address.
There is plenty of blame to distribute.
The more consequential question is whether the federal government has built an eligibility system capable of doing what it expects local housing authorities to do.
For now, the answer contained in HUD’s own audits appears to be: not reliably.
