The defunct community organizing group ACORN is in hot water yet again. This time, one of ACORN’s affiliates claimed qualifications it didn’t actually possess in order to receive a $450,000 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Through its Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program, FEMA awarded the ACORN Institute, a New Orleans affiliate of ACORN, $450,000 to implement a fire safety and prevention program — but the ACORN Institute was neither qualified for the grant nor responsible in its implementation of the program, according to an as-yet-unreleased report by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general.
“We concluded that the ACORN Institute should not have received these funds, did not fully implement and evaluate the program as approved and could not substantiate all its grant expenditures,” the inspector general writes in the report, which was prepared at the request of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the senior Republican on the Committee of Homeland Security and Government Affairs, and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
To qualify for the grant — designed for organizations with expertise in fire prevention and safety — the ACORN Institute claimed in its 2007 application to have garnered experience in the field through its work with the Urban Fire Initiative, described as a partnership between the ACORN Institute and local fire departments. That experience supposedly included gutting more than 3,000 homes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, designing programs to educate daycare providers about fire prevention and sponsoring community meetings on fire safety in coordination with local firefighters and officials.
But according to the DHS inspector general’s report, the Urban Fire Initiative did not exist until the ACORN Institute created it to apply for the grant and neither the ACORN Institute nor the Urban Fire Initiative was involved in any of the activities the grant application described.
“It is really unthinkable that anyone would use the guise of public safety and helping victims of a tragedy like Hurricane Katrina as a calculating way to inappropriately obtain taxpayer dollars,” Issa said.
FEMA didn’t attempt to verify the ACORN Institute’s application. As the inspector general’s report states, “The only assurance FEMA had for the legitimacy of claims ACORN Institute made about its experience and partners was self-certification of the applicant. FEMA has no requirement or standard procedure in the evaluation process of the Fire Prevention and Safety grant applications to validate the legitimacy of significant claims and assertions used to qualify an applicant for the grant.”
Nor did FEMA ensure that the ACORN Institute at least used its grant money responsibly. According to the inspector general’s report, the ACORN Institute could not provide documentation for how it spent $160,034 of the funds the inspector general selected for review — which excluded $111,046 of the total grant money.
This is not the first time an ACORN affiliate has failed to account for the way it used taxpayer dollars. Since 1995, ACORN Housing Corp., Inc., of Chicago, now the Affordable Housing Centers of America, has accepted more than $19 million in housing counseling grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development — but it hasn’t properly documented how it used those grants, according to a report by the HUD inspector general.
“Availability of records impeded [HUD’s] attempt to trace AHC’s summary schedules of counselors’ salary expenses to the housing counseling activities that occurred,” that report stated.
Such examples demonstrate the need for more aggressive oversight, Issa and the inspectors general have said.
“As the discussion over how to reign in government’s growth and spending moves forward, there couldn’t be a more important time to ensure that the grants awarded with taxpayer dollars meet rigorous criteria and are subject to vigilant oversight to ensure that grant recipients are not given access to taxpayer dollars under false pretenses,” Issa said.
Tina Korbe is a reporter in the Center for Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
