**GAO-05-288R**                      Published: Mar 10, 2005. Publicly Released: Mar 10, 2005.                  

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## Highlights

In a recently completed report for Congress, we evaluated how the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Rural Housing Service (RHS) makes eligibility determinations for its rural housing programs. As part of that review, we used 2000 census data to determine the populations of the rural areas that received RHS housing program loans and grants. We obtained information on the RHS loans and grants provided to communities, from October 1998 through April 2004, from databases maintained by USDA's Information Resource Management (IRM) in St. Louis, Missouri. As with any system, the accuracy of the data and the process used for entry affects reliability and usefulness for management and reporting purposes. During our review, we identified several issues that raised concerns about the accuracy of the information in the IRM databases. For example, while we originally intended to geocode (that is, match) 5 years of the national RHS housing loan and grant portfolio to specific communities, the time needed to ensure the reliability of the data required us to limit much of our analysis to five states (Arizona, California, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Ohio). This report is a follow-up on our report to Congress, and its purpose is to discuss the implications of the data issues for the management and reporting functions of the Administrator, Rural Housing Service. In this report, we describe (1) the types of inaccuracies we encountered with the RHS data and (2) what, if any, reviews and systems controls are in place to detect or control database errors.

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## Topics

Housing

Data collectionData integrityEligibility determinationsFederal aid for housingInformation resources managementInternal controlsPopulation statisticsProgram evaluationRural housing programsDatabases