Grassley: IRS ‘terrible’ at overseeing housing credit

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) chided the IRS on Thursday for what he called a “terrible” job at overseeing a tax credit for low-income housing.

At Grassley’s request, the Government Accountability Office looked into the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and found IRS oversight had been “minimal.”

{mosads}The tax break, the largest federal initiative for affordable housing, cost about $8 billion in 2014, the GAO said.

“This report confirms what we’ve seen again and again: The federal government is good at giving out money and tax breaks and terrible at checking on results,” Grassley said. 

The IRS oversees the tax break, which gives private-equity groups incentives to invest in low-income housing, with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

Neither, Grassley said, seem “to have any way of knowing whether a multibillion-dollar program for low-income housing has worked as intended. This doesn’t bring accountability, and it may or may not deliver affordable housing for people in need.”

The GAO chalked up part of the IRS’s issues to funding problems. The agency has been on its high-risk list for a quarter century, and its “budget has been reduced by 10 percent and enforcement program performance and staffing levels have declined since 2010.”