There’s a word in affordable housing that makes everyone uncomfortable, and for good reason - it’s the F word. That’s right, you guessed it: Fraud.

It happens all of the time but you don’t want to talk about it. People get quietly let go because of an internal audit that reveals irregularities in the waitlist. And the compliance department begins the inevitable scramble to prepare for a HUD Management and Occupancy Review (MOR) that could go catastrophically bad. 

But what if instead of getting surprised by fraud during an audit, you could get automatically alerted to it so you could deal with it proactively?

Well, today we’re excited to announce a new Haven Connect feature that could help you nip fraud in the bud and shield your company from the fallout: Automated Fraud Detection.

If you’d like us to show you how it works, you can sign up for a free demo here. If you schedule a free demo before December 31st, 2021, we’ll even take $199 off your next Automated Waitlist Update.

Fraud in Affordable Housing is a Real Problem

It goes without saying that affordable housing is seeing record demand in the US. In fact, we’ve seen waitlists with applicants who applied 15 years ago and are still patiently waiting to get into an affordable home. But not everybody is willing to remain patient.

One of the major challenges facing affordable housing property managers is fraud detection and prevention. Perhaps you remember the news about the three employees of the Coney Island, NY, housing corporation who were accused of accepting over $850,000 in bribes from affordable housing applicants.

When many applicants are expected to spend between 2-10 years on a waiting list, it can be difficult to resist the temptation to “jump the queue” when an unscrupulous administrator solicits a bribe. Not only is this highly illegal and unfair to the other applicants who play by the rules, this predatory behavior frequently takes advantage of the people with the least amount of disposable income.

And property management companies who fail to prevent this kind of fraud can face staggering fines and a public relations nightmare. 

Haven Connect Helps Automatically Detect Fraud

Instead of getting surprised by fraud during an audit, we wanted to help automate fraud detection to enable our customers to deal with it proactively. And since HUD lifted the suspension of MORs due to the pandemic, it’s even more important to be prepared.

So to help combat fraud at each of your properties, we created a report that automatically culls applications that look potentially fraudulent. Here’s what it looks like:

Our customers have already used this report to detect and deal with fraud proactively. Let’s schedule a quick demo so we can show you how to automatically detect fraud at your company, too.

Sign up for a free demo today.