Anchorage funded a program to fix 20 homes. It fixed one — and no one was penalized.

An internal audit of the Anchorage Health Department found that the federally funded housing and shelter programs it oversees repeatedly fell short of what they were paid to do — and that the department, for three years, never once used the penalties written into its contracts to do anything about it.

One subrecipient was under contract to repair 20 mobile homes in 2025. It repaired one. A shelter paid to provide 9,000 bed nights a year delivered 5,526. In both cases, the contracts gave the city the power to withhold money for missing those goals. The manager overseeing the program told auditors they had never assessed a penalty or withheld funds from anyone, for anything.

Oversight of the paperwork was nearly as thin. Of 101 reporting requirements the audit reviewed from 2023 through 2026, 95 fell short in some way — reports never filed, filed incompletely, filed late, or with no record of when they arrived at all. Auditors also turned up missing procurement records, agreements that were never updated with current goals, and one subrecipient contract left expired for nearly three months.

The money at stake is federal Community Development Block Grant funding — the same pot the city is now asking the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to approve $2.57 million of for the coming year, with its plan due to HUD in August.

The Health Department agreed with all nine of the audit's findings. It said it began tracking reporting deadlines through Microsoft Planner in October 2024, and that it is writing formal procedures to strengthen monitoring and enforcement, with a target of finishing them by Aug. 1.