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Washingtonians’ tax dollars are going toward an affordable housing fund that the D.C. Auditor says has “unreliable” reporting, isn’t fully serving its target population, and is owed millions of dollars from borrowers, among other critiques.

The Office of the D.C. Auditor, headed by Kathy Patterson, released a report on Thursday that provides more than three dozen recommendations to help the city better manage the 16-year-old Housing Production Trust Fund.

As of October 2016, the fund has received over $1 billion, after an early period without adequate funding. Under the Bowser administration, the fund has received $100 million annually toward projects that are supposed to help families categorized as “extremely low-income”—earning less than one-third of the local median income, or $32,580 for a family of four—”very low income,” and “low income.”

The Department of Housing Community Development, which manages the fund, gives gap financing to nonprofit and for-profit developers to build or preserve affordable units to house these residents, who are most impacted by the city’s current housing crisis.

The auditor sampled 14 out of DHCD’s reported 158 multi-family projects—a total number of projects that the auditor found “to be unreliable ” and possibly inaccurate. Of those, 10 of the 14 projects were selected for a detailed review.

According to the report, seven out of those 10 sites did not continuously provide the required number of affordable units required by the loan agreements. The auditor attributes this to DHCD’s absence of sufficient monitoring such as site visits and enforcing the submission of annual certifications. This was partly due to the department’s lack of staff, “but also due to a lack of a developed strategy.”

The report also reveals that residents who earn more than the low-income requirements are “getting the benefit of the affordable units and lower rent, and, more importantly, those with a true need for housing assistance are not receiving it.”

The auditor says this comes, in part, from DHDC not having developed any procedures for developers to implement income certification policies. The effect of this “was most striking” when the auditor found that all of the properties visited “had different methods for certifying household income, which varied greatly in quality.”

“While we found it encouraging that most property managers indicated that they wished to comply with legal requirements and wanted more guidance from DHCD, the agency appeared to have a hands-off approach to projects once they had been selected for funding,” the report says.

In addition, three sites didn’t have their tenants re-certifying their household incomes on a yearly basis, which is also a requirement.

Meanwhile, the report says the fund is due $1.1 million from nine loans partly because the department didn’t have its own database of loan information for each borrower and its assets division was under staffed. It also points out that the amount due for the entire HPTF portfolio “is likely much greater and represents funds that could have been used for additional projects.”

The audit gives a total of 39 recommendations for these and other issues.

DHCD Director Polly Donaldson responded to the audit in a statement saying that the department “appreciates the opportunity to constructively examine compliance with the laws and regulations associated with the implementation” of the HPTF and the department is committed “to being a good fiduciary and steward of a signature local funding source that is vital in creating pathways to the middle class for District residents.”

She also pointed out that the report looked at HPTF’s entire administrative history, which includes a five-year period in which it “was not well funded.” But Mayor Bowser “began making historic investments” in the fund in January 2015, “and we don’t want the public to lose sight of the program’s successes since then.”

The mayor’s commitment of $100 million annually during her administration to support affordable housing is “more than any city per capita in the country,” Donaldson said.

Housing Production Trust Fund Audit by Christina Sturdivant on Scribd