Increasingly Los Angeles is being cited as a poster child for homelessness. Clearly there are solid reasons for this, not the least being the high cost of housing. But according to a new audit by Alvarez & Marsal Public Sector Services, LLC., the performance of the Los Angeles Homelessness Services Authority (LAHSA), which serves both city and county, has been remarkably problematic.  

The audit came about from a request by U.S. District Judge David Carter who has been in charge of a case brought by the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights which claimed that local governments have been failing to effectively fight homelessness in the region. Those claims were well substantiated by the recent audit.

One of its key findings was that “repetitive information gaps, coupled with a lack of accurate and complete data and documentation posed significant obstacles to this assessment. Insufficient financial accountability has led to an inability to trace substantial funds. . . track participant outcome and align financial data with performance metrics.” 

What’s more, multiple referral processes and separate data systems prevented the city and county from prioritizing where the billions of dollars it controlled should best be spent, and knowing how effectively the dollars that were going out were being used, stating that “antiquated systems and manual processes prolonged budget amendments and inconsistent invoice submission practices resulted in administrative inefficiencies and potential payment delays.” 

And that’s just the beginning of this litany of ways the LAHSA has apparently mismanaged homelessness, according to the report.

Contracting, for example – which is key to any efforts to combat homelessness – was another area in which profound weaknesses were found. In fact, the report complains that “Contracts between the city, LAHSA, and service providers frequently contained broad terms without clear definitions, which created ambiguity about the scope and type of service delivered” 

Finally, the audit found that there was a wide variety of charges associated with programs that were supposed to be accomplishing similar missions. For example, the audit “observed the following ranges in expenses between the sampled sites (on  per-bed, per-day basis personnel expenses) ranged from $67 to $7, and security expenses ranged from $32 to $2. 

Of course, some of the reasons for this range may be as simple as the degree to which certain populations of homeless people needed help, but the auditor found that much of the variety in cost could be attributed to wildly uneven staffing levels across providers coupled with minimal tracking of the outcomes they produced.

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