The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a semiannual report to Congress this week, designed to offer more robust perspectives on the Department’s audits, evaluations and investigations for the period of October 1, 2021 through March 31, 2022 including reverse mortgage issues which have arisen during that period.
The report details various actions that the OIG has taken across a wide variety of HUD programs, up to and including the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) program as sponsored by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).
These include the implementation of actions related to reverse mortgage occupancy requirements; defining risk that taxpayers were exposed to as a result of insufficient flood insurance on HECM proprerties; establishing the 2022 HECM lending limit and resolving outstanding issues.
Reverse mortgage occupancy, housing investigations and audit
Within the office of audit, HUD’s OIG found that one reverse mortgage-related issue stemmed from a lack of corrective actions taken when the Department determined that HECM borrowers did not always comply with the loan’s principal residency requirements.
“OIG completed a corrective action verification (CAV) of recommendations from four prior [HECM] audit reports,” the OIG report reads. “The CAV was initiated because one of HUD’s top management challenges is to protect the FHA Mutual Mortgage Insurance…
