GAO to HUD: Answer the phone at housing complaint centers
To assess enforcement of the federal Fair Housing Act, the Government Accountability Office made test calls last year to 10 regional offices of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and to 36 statewide housing agencies authorized to process bias complaints.
“Our test calls revealed some potentially serious lapses,” GAO, Congress’ investigative arm, reported Friday. In five of the 46 calls, the agency did not return a message left by a test caller alleging discrimination, even after three attempts.
In two cases, the housing office required the caller to provide information either over the Internet or in person.
In just 20 cases, fewer than half the test calls, did the caller reach a live person on the first call. In nine instances requiring a callback, six were not returned within one business day and three were not returned for three or more days.
Floyd O. May, deputy assistant HUD secretary for fair housing, wrote GAO that his agency has several initiatives under way to improve the handling of complaints.
Although GAO said its test was too small to represent fairly the entire experience of callers, it said a random survey it took of 575 people who complained that year indicated the test results were not a fluke.
Among those surveyed, 30 percent said it was somewhat or very difficult to reach a live person the first time they called, and 34 percent said they had difficulty contacting staff after the initial contact.
Because almost all complaints arrive by phone — only 5 percent in person or by Internet — GAO said the initial response “plays an important role in the fair housing complaint process.” Depending on the handling of initial calls, “complainants may or may not feel comfortable continuing the process, and those who do not may give up on pursuing their complaints,” GAO said.
In addition, GAO found, workers taking the calls “did not seem to display a sense of urgency in dealing with complaints.” More than half the agencies, 23 of the 39 where a person was reached by phone, gathered data about the complaint by having the caller fill out a form.
“The initial phone call requested little more than the complainant’s name and mailing address,” GAO said. “Using such a form to gather information for a potential complaint could take a week or more, during which the caller could lose a housing opportunity.”
One test caller who stressed the urgency of her situation was told that filing a complaint was “a slow process” and that her complaint would not be acted on for some time.
HUD’s May wrote to GAO that his agency has created a national training academy for fair housing workers and has nearly finished revising its employee handbook for handling complaints.
May added that a HUD case processing research project had developed a triage method for sorting initial complaints that would be field tested over the next nine months in HUD’s Atlanta; Fort Worth, Texas, and Seattle offices. He also said HUD’s fair housing office had revamped its internal processes to implement best practices and a similar effort was about to begin in field offices.
The Fair Housing Act bars discrimination in housing sales or rentals on the basis of color, family status, handicap, national origin, race, religion or sex.
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On the Net:
GAO report: http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-06-79