Award Made After Recent House Appropriations Resolution Specifically Banned Federal Funds To AHCOA
The Freedom Through Justice Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest group, has found that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”) gave $300,000 on August 11, 2011 to the Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA), which until last year, was ACORN-affiliate ACORN Housing Corporation. HUD believes that AHCOA is not an ACORN-affiliate and relied on a September 29, 2010 U.S. Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) determination that the Affordable Housing Centers of America is not an affiliate or related organization of ACORN. Congress has until September 29, 2011 to appeal this decision before it becomes unreviewable. Last week, the Freedom Through Justice Foundation wrote to NeighborWorks America concerning the importance of its publicly releasing an audit report that may present definitive evidence that AHCOA and ACORN are, in fact, affiliated. The fact that NeighborWorks, in its recent announcement of National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling (“NFMC”) grant recipients, chose not to fund the previously funded AHCOA, combined with the fact that the June 14, 2011 GAO final report on ACORN’s federal funding cited a report written by the NeighborWorks Office of Special Audit concerning the financial relationship between AHCOA and ACORN, raises the inference that the Office of Special Audit report found AHCOA to be an affiliate or related organization of ACORN. (NeighborWorks, Office of Internal Audit, Special Audit on the Use of National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling Program Grant Funds by ACORN Housing Corporation, Inc. (Washington, D.C., 2010)). The Office of Inspector General at HUD has already targeted AHCOA as an organization which mismanaged taxpayer dollars and a recent Homeland Security appropriations resolution passed by the U.S. House of Representatives specifically identifies the Affordable Housing Centers of America as an ACORN affiliate that should be barred from federal funding.
