The homeless services provided by the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority are disjointed and lack adequate financial data and financial control systems to monitor compliance and performance contracts, leaving the vulnerable system to waste and fraud, an audit ordered by a federal judge concluded.
The audit of the World Consulting Company Alvarez & Marsal noted that the City was unable to follow exactly the quantity it spent on the homeless programs and did not rigorously reconcile the expenses with the services provided, which makes it impossible to judge to what extent the services operated or if they were even provided.
The contracts written by Lahsa were vague, allowing large variations in the services provided and their cost, he said.
These results echo a report of November by the auditor of the County Angeles County auditor who found that the lax accounting procedures led to the non-recovery of millions of dollars in cash advances to entrepreneurs and to pay other entrepreneurs in time, even when funds were available.
The audit, published on the website of the American district judge, David O. Carter, was born out of a trial in 2020 filed by the alliance of the human rights, a group representing business owners, residents and owners of property, who alleged that the city and the county failed in their duty to provide shelter and services to people living in the streets.
The city and the county have reached colonies providing thousands of new shelters and additional treatment of mental health and consumption of substances.
But under the continuous monitoring of these regulations, Carter said on several occasions that he wanted more transparency for homelessness expenses and insisted that the city also finances an external audit.
A lawyer for complainants, Elizabeth Mitchell, said the audit validated the fundamental allegations of the trial, strengthening the urgent need for systemic reform.
“These findings are not only disturbing – they are deadly,” said Mitchell. “The failure of financial integrity, programmatic surveillance and total system of the system has led to a devastation in the streets, which affects both and without incapacity.
“Billions have been wasted on an ineffective bureaucracy while the lives are lost daily. It is not only poor management; It is a moral failure.
Lahsa has published a declaration recognizing “the partitioned and fragmented nature of the response of the homeless of our region for motivating the quality and integration of data, the lack of contractual clarity and the services disjointed as major obstacles to success and surveillance.”
He declared that he had reached the same conclusion in 2021 and had since “pleaded for the creation of a regional organization to demand the collaboration between the city, the county and Lahsa, as well as proposed in the audit of the court”.
A number of elected officials intervened.
The supervisor Lindsey Horvath said she considered the audit as an approval of her proposal to create a new county department which would take control of the contractual tasks of Lahsa.
“More waste thanks to duplicated resources,” Horvath said in a statement. “More contracts for services that do not deliver. We need responsibility and results at the moment. »»
The mayor Karen Bass, whose signature homeless program inside Safe received slight criticism to prioritize the location on needs, also published a declaration characterizing it as a validation for her efforts to “change what is removed for decades”.
“The broken system that the audit identifies is what I have been fighting since I got into office,” she said. “We still have work to do, but the changes we have made have contributed to overthrowing years of increased homelessness to a decrease of 10% – the first in the years. The city, the county and Lahsa work together to change and improve the system and we are committed to continuing to do so. »»
The member of the Los Angeles Council, Nithya Raman, published a declaration indicating that the audit strengthened the need for a motion that it presented last month, proposing a new division of the city to centralize the surveillance of the city’s homeless expenditure.
“This work must occur now: it is more than simple measures-it is a question of saving the lives of people by bringing them inside safe,” she said.
The audit has shown no copies of fraud or proven waste, but has highlighted many missing or overlapping controls that have left programs open to abuse.
Lahsa, for example, had no standardized method to determine when a accommodation bed was available and its financing was not adjusted according to the number of beds occupied, a dynamic which “may have contributed to data differences, to the distribution of potentially inequitable funds, and in addition, a reduced motivation to maximize the occupation for the benefit of non -inexputte”.
The lack of specificity in contracts could lead to cascade problems such as insufficient locked storage spaces, which could dissuade non -stimulating people from accepting the shelter, to discourage those who are in the shelter to leave to find work and to exacerbate the insecurity of people with tendencies to hoarding.
Auditors defeated Lahsa’s surveillance structure for the use of the same team that approved bills and cash requests to monitor performance.
“In this arrangement, a impartial judgment may have been compromised, in particular if payment approvals are in conflict with the conclusions that indicate service gaps,” he said.
Overall, the audit revealed that the county direct contract system with service providers offered “more effective coordination and clearer responsibility” than the city’s indirect contracts via Lahsa.
Alvarez and Marsal who said he could carry out the audit between 2.8 and $ 4.2 million, was selected from three tenderers.
The city initially agreed in April to pay the audit but limited its contribution to $ 2.2 million. This amount has since been increased as the scope has developed.
The audit was initially planned to include not only the city shelters who have undertaken to create within the framework of the colony, but also of the interior security program of Mayor Karen Bass, the controversial anti-campaign law of the city and the cleaning of the street by the Care + teams of the Sanitation Bureau. It was then extended to include LAPD homeless activities and county services to the city shelters, while the application of the anti-campaing law was abandoned.
In the follow-up hearings, representatives of Alvarez & Marsal told Carter that he had trouble obtaining the files necessary for his work from the city, the county and the services of the Los Angeles Sans-Abri.
In October, Diane Firferty, director general of Alvarez & Marsal, described “heartbreaking” experiences in field visits in shelters and street camps.
“Every day that passes, there are people on the streets who do not receive the services for which the city pays,” said Flatty in court.
She described a resident of the refuge with brain trauma who frequently missed the cutting time for meals and “would prostitute herself in the street to obtain food”.
A shelter provided for four cases managers only had two on site for 130 customers.
After street visits, she said, she was concerned about her SSPT team.
“The emotion that came out when they saw what they saw and how these people live, with all the money who went to service providers was heartbreaking.”
But the details provided in the 161 -page audit sometimes softened the sharp tone of the conclusions with the recognition of the challenge of front -line workers to which workers serve difficult customers in a fractured system.
Noting the consumption disorder of substances of 31% and the serious mental illness of 24% reported by the homeless homeless in the most recent counting, he found that the morale of service providers was tense by “crisis situations involving aggressive behavior or self-harassment”, for which they “lacked the training, expertise and resources necessary to adequately meet these needs”.
California Daily Newspapers
