Rental Housing Integrity Improvement Project (RHIIP)

What is RHIIP?

The Rental Housing Integrity Improvement Project (RHIIP) is a priority Secretarial initiative designed to reduce income and rent errors and improper payments in the administration of both public housing and Section 8 programs.

RHIIP is a comprehensive strategy to correct program errors in HUD's high-risk rental housing subsidy programs and related management control deficiencies. HUD's objective is to ensure that the correct amount of assistance goes to the people who need it.

Income and Rent Problem

The 2001 Policy Development and Research (PD&R) Quality Control for Rental Assistance Subsidies Determinations study (QC study), found that 60 percent of all rent and subsidy calculations contained some type of error. The most common sources of errors are:

• Calculation errors
• Failure to verify income/expenses
• Failure to use UIV tools & techniques
• Incorrect income and deduction amounts (i.e., earned income, pension income, and medical allowances)

Onsite tenant interviews, file review, and independent third-party income verifications were conducted by an independent contractor for a nationally representative sample of families who received public housing and Section 8 HCV assistance.

Successive QC studies

HUD will conduct successive QC studies to establish estimates of error, provide periodic performance indicators, and verify the effectiveness of HUD's corrective actions. Read the results of the FY 2003 QC study at: http://www.huduser.org/publications/pubasst/qualcontrol03.html

Preliminary results from the first of these follow-up studies were reported in the December 19, 2003 Inspector General's Audit Report under Note 17 (Adobe PDF). They showed that HUD had exceeded its error reduction goals for FY 2003.