The goals of agencies nationwide could be disrupted if an audit of home weatherizing work in Illinois exposes widespread deficiencies.
It took an audit of just five homes in Illinois by the Department of Energy for its inspector general, Gregory Friedman, to issue a nationwide alert in December. Shoddy work and a lack of inspection, Friedman said, put people's safety and the goals of the federal stimulus program to improve low-income homes at risk. The alert also halted all work in Illinois until federal energy department officials were satisfied that the state was in compliance.
Similar audits of the Weatherization Assistance Program were being done in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The results of those audits have not been released.
Leslie Paige, who has monitored weatherization for the fiscally conservative group Citizens Against Government Waste, said Friedman's alert suggested that the Department of Energy's concerns about quality of work and oversight go beyond five homes in one state.
"I think what you will find is that this is just the tip of the iceberg, but we don't know about it because you can't find any auditing," Paige said. "I think what happened in Illinois shows that with all of this supposed oversight there is room for waste and fraud."
In Texas, state officials have doubled the number of inspections from the federal minimum of 5 percent of all homes weatherized to 10 percent, said Michael Gerber, the executive director of the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs. Each inspection would include four random visits to a site rather than just one, he said.
The added administrative cost, he said, will be well worth it.
Texas has a deadline of March 2012 to spend the $327 million allotted by the federal government for the state's weatherization program, and through December had spent $3.7 million and weatherized just 47 homes. When asked whether adding the cost of more home inspections on an already top-heavy program could keep the state from meeting the deadline, the normally upbeat Gerber got a little testy.
"No matter what we have to do," he said, "the state of Texas will not leave one penny of these dollars on the table."
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