Income Verification System 

Important note: new Income Verification System will check and verify all household members’ incomes. 

The incomes of everyone in your household will be checked by a new system developed by the U.S. Housing and Urban Department (HUD). The way this will work is that the Housing Commission will receive wage and other earnings data from various reliable sources and match this against what you have previously reported. 

The new Income Verification System will enable staff to verify all incomes as well as to identify any members of the household whose incomes may not have been reported – for example, the wages of other adult members of your household or social security income for minors. 

It is very important that you provide accurate income information – because if you don’t, you could be terminated from the Rental Assistance Program. In other words, failure to report income is fraud and you could lose your assistance as a consequence!

To ease the transition to this new process there will be some flexibility at first. For the first year only of this new system, the Housing Commission will be lenient toward participants who may have failed to completely report income in the past. So if you are concerned that you may have provided incorrect information in the past, please be sure to fully report all household members’ incomes at the time of your next annual recertification. If you do this, you can stay on the program, but you may owe money. (You would be required to pay back rent portions that the Housing Commission overpaid your landlord.) 

Pay-back and termination guidelines:

• If you provide corrected income information at the time of your next annual recertification and the unreported amount is less than $5,000, you can keep your assistance and you won’t be required to pay back any money. If the amount is more than $5,000, you will still be able to stay on the program, but you’ll have to pay back a portion (approximately the amount you would have paid in rent) of the unreported income. This offer is only good at your next recertification.
   

• If you do not report all household income at your next recertification, you will be required to paying back a portion of unreported income exceeding $2,400. If the unreported amount is more than $15,000 you will be terminated from the program in addition to being required to pay back money owed.

• Money owed (based on a HUD formula):  the amount you will be required to pay back will be calculated at 30 of the gross (before taxes) amount of unreported income.
   

• Payment arrangements may be made in some cases.