Top Government National Mortgage Association officials spent $3.9 million on a public relations campaign designed to create positive images for themselves, including a magazine piece on how one of them avoided obesity.
Spending tax dollars to polish an individual employee’s image is “not reasonable” and much of the spending isn’t allowed under Federal Acquisition Regulations, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Inspector General said in a report released Tuesday. The association – which is popularly known as “Ginnie Mae” — is part of HUD.
“The majority of the charges related to Ginnie Mae’s president, Theodore W. Tozer, and its former executive vice president, Mary K. Kinney,” the IG said. “This activity did not clearly meet the [rules] for allowable public relations and advertising costs.”
The IG said the public image of top people wasn’t even relevant since Ginnie Mae doesn’t do business with the public, saying “Ginnie Mae guarantees mortgage-backed securities of government-insured loans. These securities are issued by approved private lending institutions … Therefore, media outreach initiatives to promote members of its senior staff, particularly articles that do not pertain specifically to the work of Ginnie Mae, may not have been reasonable or necessary.”
Ginnie Mae officials signed the PR contract in 2011 with the Burson-Marsteller firm. Burson-Marsteller is part of Young & Rubicam, a PR giant that has received at least $75 million in federal contracts since 2008, according to USASpending.gov, including one with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Ginnie Mae justified the contract by claiming that “instilling confidence in Ginnie Mae’s leadership, particularly its top staff, is especially crucial for a government corporation.”
This is the same agency, as the Daily Caller News Foundation exclusively reported earlier this week, that hired a fake Certified Public Accountant as Chief Financial Officer and put him in charge of Ginnie Mae’s $1.5 trillion mortgage portfolio. (RELATED: Meet the Serial Con Artist Hired To Manage $1.5 Trillion Mortgage Portfolio)
Ginnie Mae officials knew in advance that David Fender was fired from his previous job and lied about it on his Ginnie Mae application, but hired him anyway. He served as vice president and CFO from April 2014 to April 2015.
Ginnie Mae has a full-time spokesperson, Gina Screen, who is paid $130,000 a year to manage interactions with the media, so it’s unclear why both she and the PR company are necessary.
The IG pointed out that former executive vice president Mary K. Kinney telling Shape.com about “exercise and maintaining a healthy diet” does not show “that Ginnie Mae’s top leaders were capable and knowledgeable and could make financial decisions or informed stakeholders that Ginnie Mae had the appropriate leadership in place to efficiently execute the program.”
The contract paid for “outreach to media outlets to position its president, Theodore W. Tozer, as an industry expert who could provide unique insights into the housing industry and economy.” Tozer was also trained “on the most skillful methods to answer inquiries,” according to Ginnie Mae.
Building “confidence that Ginnie Mae’s top leaders are capable and knowledgeable and can make financial decisions is a crucial element of successfully meeting our mission,” the agency claimed.
Screen did not respond to TheDCNF’s request to interview Tozer about the PR contract.
In addition to questions about the legality of the PR contract, there was no documentation of some payments to Burson-Marsteller and improper documentation for other payments. The payments were made during the period in which Fender plunged Ginnie Mae’s bookkeeping into such chaos that the IG said $6.6 billion worth of entries couldn’t be audited.
The agency “approved [Burson-Marsteller] work orders without having proper written authority … file lacked documentation to support some charges, and … did not show that it had completed contractor performance assessment reports.”
It also learned years ago that there were problems with payments to the company, but did nothing to improve, which is a recurring problem throughout HUD. “HUD did not adequately follow up on the issues identified,” the IG said.
A 2015 IG report found that Ginnie Mae scarcely seemed to care if it had competent people running it. Fender’s “resume indicated no federal financial management experience. The Deputy Chief Financial Officer position has remained vacant as of January 2015, more than a year after the former Deputy Chief Financial Officer left; and the announcement for the Controller position was not posted until January 2015, nine months after the former Controller left.
“Ginnie Mae indicated that backfilling the vacancies was deferred temporarily to allow the new Chief Financial Officer an opportunity to assess the organization and overall staffing needs. We question how this could be that executive management would not have already known its staffing skills and needs in such an important office.”
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