Priority Open Recommendations: Department of Housing and Urban Development

What GAO Found

In June 2024, GAO identified 11 priority recommendations for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Since then, HUD implemented two of those recommendations. First, HUD implemented quality assurance checks of Continuums of Care's (CoC) Point-in-Time count methodology data. Specifically, HUD evaluates CoCs' data methodology submissions for year-over-year variations and checks whether any validation flags are triggered. Second, HUD developed and implemented a privacy risk management strategy to ensure compliance with federal privacy requirements and to safeguard the personal information HUD collects.

As of May 2025, GAO had not identified any additional priority recommendations for HUD. The nine priority recommendations involve the following areas:

• Reducing fraud risk in federal funding for disaster recovery,
• Addressing challenges in federal disaster recovery efforts,
• Improving data collection on homelessness, and
• Improving IT management.

HUD's continued attention to these issues could lead to significant improvements in government operations.

Why GAO Did This Study

Priority open recommendations are the GAO recommendations that warrant priority attention from heads of key departments or agencies because their implementation could save large amounts of money; improve congressional or executive branch decision-making on major issues; eliminate mismanagement, fraud, and abuse; or ensure that programs comply with laws and funds are legally spent, among other benefits. Since 2015, GAO has sent letters to selected agencies to highlight the importance of implementing such recommendations.

For more information, contact Daniel Garcia-Diaz at garciadiazd@gao.gov.