Military families face health, safety hazards due to poor oversight of privatized housing

The military services “may be allowing” families to move into homes that are riddled with health and safety hazards due to Military Housing offices’ poor oversight of privatized housing units, a government watchdog has found.

The Defense Department office of inspector general looked at how military housing officials across seven installations oversee the work that Hunt Military Communities, one of the largest providers of maintenance and management for the department’s military family housing, performs.

“There have been issues that have been identified by other organizations related to safety issues at military housing, but typically those are ports, and those issues are identified at specific locations and specific services. So we want to take the opportunity to look across the Department of Defense and see if there are any issues that are sort of systemic or overarching among the services,” Cristopher DePerro, program director at the OIG, told Federal News Network.

“It wasn’t so much to look at what Hunt did. It was more to look at what the military housing officials at those bases did to oversee that work, to make sure it was done properly and to make sure that was completed in accordance with the agreements on those bases,” he added.

The big issues that the IG office identified, DePerro said, all fell under the “theme of consistency.” “Throughout the report, when you talk about guidance or actions, it really came down to consistency or lack of consistency.”

First, the OIG found that the military housing officials didn’t complete “any of the 14 change-of-occupancy maintenance inspections,” DePerro’s team observed. 

In 2020, Congress directed the military services to inspect homes before new tenants moved in, to ensure they were habitable and free of hazards and safety issues such as mold or pest infestations. In response, the Defense Department created a change-of-occupancy maintenance checklist, which was meant to help military housing officials ensure that housing units were ready for move-in. 

DePerro said that military housing officials at all seven installations either failed to complete the checklist or skipped parts of the checklist that could have allowed them to identify some of the hazards and concerns. 

“Just one quick example. One of the requirements is to make sure that any room has the proper egress or routes of escape in case there’s an emergency or need of rescue. So you go into a room, you have the doorway, but you may also have windows. What they should have been doing is making sure that those windows operated, that you can open it, and that you could egress or get out easily and safely, but what we observed was that they didn’t open up those windows,” DePerro said.

“We also observed where the inspectors didn’t go into crawl spaces or attics, where really you might identify some of the issues related to moisture, mold or pest infestations,” he added. 

The report also details how military housing officials failed to ensure that the washer and dryer outlets were free of electrical hazards and that smoke and carbon monoxide detectors were working. 

While some inspection failures stemmed from limited resources or officials simply not completing the checklist, DePerro said they found a lack of consistency or clear instructions on how to complete those checklists.

“You might have something on your checklist that tells you to go check crawl spaces or check for moisture, but it’s sort of general in that respect, and it may not get into the technical aspects of how to complete that specific inspection. One of the things that we recommended was for standard instructions on how to complete that particular checklist. And again, if you have inconsistent guidance or lack of guidance, it allows for different interpretations or different practices that the inspectors think would be appropriate, and maybe it isn’t sufficient. So that’s really one of the big areas of concern related to the checklist,” DePerro said.

In addition, the OIG found that the military housing officials did not comply with the actual oversight of the work orders performed by Hunt. 

The system works much like a traditional apartment building. If a resident has an issue, they submit a work order in a system and Hunt will review the request and assign it to a category such as routine maintenance, urgent order or emergency order. In addition, each military service requires its officials to review a certain number of those orders to ensure they were done properly.

“That’s again where we see some inconsistencies, because it isn’t consistent within the department. For example, the Army requires their housing officials to look at or to contact 5% of the residents who had a work order in any one of those categories. That’s much different than the Air Force, who has very specific percentages for each of those work order types.” 

And while there is an inconsistency across the services on the level of review, some of the installations that the OIG visited failed to meet the requirements they had in place. 

One Army installation, for instance, managed to contact only 2% of the residents — less than the 5% required.

A lot of it came down to resources, DePerro said. The OIG found that the Fort Sam Houston military housing office only had two staff members to oversee 925 housing units.  

“According to a [military housing office] official, they spend approximately 40 to 60 hours a week completing [change of occupancy maintenance] inspections and entering the information into [enterprise Military Housing]. This leaves the two staff members 20 to 40 hours to perform all additional responsibilities,” the report reads.

In addition to being severely understaffed, military housing officials also don’t have the equipment necessary to complete the inspections. 

For instance, the checklist includes requirements for identifying electric and gas hazards, but the OIG found that the military housing officials at all seven installations did not have the proper tools to test the washer and dryer outlets or to test for natural gas leaks.

“Mold is a good example. They might walk through a unit and look for visual signs of moisture or mold, but oftentimes you could have that and have no visible signs. It’s behind a wall, it’s somewhere in a crawl space or an attic that you might not have access to. So there are tools and instruments that would allow them to identify those hazards, even if you can’t see them. But in a lot of cases, they didn’t have those available for them,” DePerro said.

Performance incentive fee plan

The DoD IG also found that the Army and Navy developed what’s called performance incentive fee plans that did not align with the common incentive fee framework, which resulted in the two services improperly incentivizing Hunt. 

“The department wanted to make sure we had some consistency across all the services in what we use to rate their performance and provide us some general categories in what’s called the framework, and the services are supposed to use this framework as a tool to design their performance incentive fee plans. And what we found is, in the case of the Army and the Navy, the plans that they developed for Hunt, in this case, didn’t comply with all aspects of that framework, and it didn’t comply with how they included certain metrics,” DePerro said.

“The result of that is, you could have the opportunity or possibility that the private company gets more compensation for something that they didn’t actually do, or didn’t do as well as we’ve rated them. Conversely, they could also lose the opportunity for increased compensation because they don’t get credit for something they do, or we scored them negatively, even though they really didn’t earn that type of negative score,” he added.

One of the watchdog’s analyses of one performance incentive fee quarterly award identified that the Army’s Fort Sam Houston military housing office overpaid $11,423.

“If the process is not changed, Fort Sam Houston will continue to make overpayments, resulting in the potential misuse of an estimated $228,460 over the next five years, totaling $1.4 million over the remaining 30 years of the partnership agreement.”

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