HUD's Transparency Double Standard

In its recent response to a NAHRO Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, HUD refused to provide the same compensation information for its own employees that it is now demanding from every PHA. That the Department is not willing to hold itself to the same standard of transparency it has chosen to impose on the public housing industry is disappointing.  Although NAHRO continues to seek additional information on HUD employee benefits, the Association is moving forward with its plans to provide the general public with information on the salary levels enjoyed by HUD political appointees and career employees.

 

As NAHRO previously reported, HUD implemented mandatory compensation reporting for PHAs through the publication of PIH Notice 2011-48 in late August. Under this new policy, PHAs are required to report compensation information for their top five compensated employees by completing and submitting the new HUD-52725 form in conjunction with their 52723 submissions. HUD implemented these new reporting requirements, which single out PHAs for a level of scrutiny not applied to any other type of organization receiving HUD funding, over NAHRO’s strenuous objections.

 

HUD-52725 is particularly burdensome and intrusive in that it requires  PHAs to report not only the base salaries for its top five compensated employees, but also the total value of all benefits provided to those employees, including:

On June 27 NAHRO wrote to HUD expressing “disappointment that the Department is poised to subject PHA employees to an unreasonable degree of public scrutiny while highly compensated HUD officials and career employees, all of whom receive 100 percent of their salaries through taxpayer dollars, have not been asked to sacrifice similarly any measure of their own privacy in the name of transparency and accountability.”  On June 28 NAHRO submitted a FOIA request for the following:

HUD granted NAHRO’s request only in part.  While the Department has provided NAHRO with a listing of all employees with base annual salaries of $100,000 or more along with titles and locations, HUD has refused to provide the “annual value of health, retirement, and other fringe benefits provided” to each employee, as requested by NAHRO.  In its response letter, HUD claims that granting NAHRO’s request in full “would cause an undue hardship on the Department” since “each employee chooses their benefits package on an individual basis” and “construct[ing] a profile for each employee would require a record to be created for each person listed.”  HUD argues that courts have previously held that, under FOIA, agencies are not required “to create new documents to satisfy FOIA requests when it [can] not readily reproduce records sought in the searchable electronic format requested.”  Although NAHRO does not find HUD’s excuses compelling, the association will submit a new, reworded request for benefits information designed to overcome the Department’s legal argument against full compliance.  

 

NAHRO Moving Forward with HUD Salary Database: NAHRO staff is currently working to turn HUD’s hard copy FOIA response into a searchable online database. Note that, according to the data provided to NAHRO by HUD thus far, there are over 4,200 HUD employees nationwide whose base salaries alone exceed $100,000. Once operational, NAHRO’s database will allow the public to search through these thousands of records by title, HUD office, and duty station – and by name, in the case of HUD political appointees. NAHRO expects that its HUD salary database will be operational by the end of November.  For more information, contact Jeff Falcusan at  jfalcusan@nahro.org.