Home Forward Said Its Budget Shortfall Had Improved. That Was Wrong, Agency Now Says.

After announcing that its $30 million budget deficit had been slashed in half earlier this year thanks to better-than-expected federal funding, the city of Portland’s housing authority said last week it had miscalculated the numbers.

The deficit, Home Forward interim executive director Michael Buonocore told the agency’s more than 300 employees in a July 7 email, was in fact $31 million, not the $13.8 million the agency had announced earlier this spring.

“There’s a lot of work ahead of us to restore Home Forward’s long-term financial health,” Buonocore wrote of the revised deficit. “We’re revamping our reporting processes so there will be more frequency and visibility on the state of our finances...I know that the idea of budget cuts is scary, and it’s hard to live with uncertainty about what those cuts will be.”

That means Home Forward, which operates more than 7,000 affordable apartments across the greater Portland area and distributes more than 12,000 housing vouchers primarily with federal funding, grossly miscalculated its budget deficit.

Agency spokesman Rylee Ahnen says the error occurred when previous leaders miscalculated the costs of distributing the agency’s housing vouchers.

“Home Forward was not accurately counting the per-month cost of certain households in the financial management tool used to project annual voucher expenses and, as a result, our budget understated the actual costs of our housing assistance programs,” Ahnen says. “Once that issue was identified, we corrected the projections and notified our staff.”

While Ahnen did not specify who exactly miscalculated figures to the tune of $15 million, both the agency’s CEO, Ivory Mathews, and chief financial officer, Kandy Sage, left the agency earlier this year following reporting about the agency’s financial and programmatic problems. Mathews’ resignation in May followed reporting about her prolific spending on travel while the agency struggled; Sage’s departure came in July, and the agency declined to offer any details about the separation.

Ahnen said Buonocore and Home Forward’s interim CFO, a consultant out of New York named Andrea Quetell, discovered the error as they “dug into our financials.”

“Addressing the deficit will be a multiyear effort. There is no single action that will eliminate it in one budget cycle. We’re committed to engaging our workforce, our program participants, and our board as we consider potential cuts, and that process will begin this summer.”