FHFA Questioned $65,690 in Stipends It Promised to Fix in 2020
Summary
FHFA's Office of Inspector General audited $3.7 million the agency paid its own employees in reimbursements and stipends -- professional licensing fees, gym memberships, home-office setup money, travel and duty stipends -- between October 2022 and March 2025. Auditors questioned $65,690 as violating FHFA's own Policy 113, $9,580 of it for missing paperwork entirely. The same failure pattern -- unsupported reimbursements, stipends paid to ineligible employees, no confirmation of accuracy -- was already the finding of a 2020 OIG audit that FHFA said it had fixed with reminder emails and a policy update. FHFA's own internal risk office flagged much of it again in 2024. The OIG's new report says FHFA still can't reliably locate the records that would prove its payments were proper.
The same failure, six years apart
This is not the first time. A 2020 FHFA-OIG audit⧉ of Fiscal Year 2019 found the same program's controls were not fully effective -- non-authorized reimbursements for multiple professional licenses, unsupported gym fees, over- and underpaid travel stipends, out-stationed stipends paid without approved agreements, and a miscalculated Examiner-in-Charge stipend. FHFA agreed to all three of that audit's recommendations, and the closed them by May 2021 after the Agency sent reminder emails to staff and supervisors, updated Policy 113, and had its then-HR director waive the remaining travel-stipend overpayments as immaterial. Five years later, testing a new three-year window of the same program, the found the identical categories of failure recurring: payments unsupported by documentation or made in violation of policy, stipends paid to employees who weren't eligible or lacked a required signed agreement, and payments disbursed with no confirmation of accuracy.
View data as table
| Life cycle stipends | 2,947,500 | 2,204 payments -- $1,000/yr through 2023, $1,500/yr from FY2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Quarterly out-stationed stipends | 370,685 | 764 payments to 92 employees |
| EIC stipends | 197,141 | 48 payments |
| Professional liability insurance | 78,436 | 186 payments |
| Professional licensing & certification | 66,880 | 280 payments |
| Travel stipends | 27,000 | 10 payments |
| One-time out-stationed stipends | 33,600 | 21 payments |
| Gym membership | 9,665 | 37 payments |
| TSA Pre-check | 945 | 13 payments |
FHFA's own risk office flagged much of this a year earlier
FHFA didn't need the to tell it this was happening. In October 2024, the Agency's own Office of Planning, Performance, and Risk⧉ tested a 24-item sample of reimbursements and stipends dating back to 2021 and found seven issues -- including a duplicate Examiner-in-Charge stipend paid twice to the same employee, in both December 2022 and December 2023, which FHFA ultimately recouped by debt letter after the overpayment exceeded $9,000. That internal review alone found roughly $16,250 in overpayments across FY2021-FY2024 -- about a quarter of the $65,690 the 's broader review would go on to question, from a sample less than a hundredth the size of what the eventually tested.
View data as table
| Quarterly out-stationed stipend | 24,431 | 0 unsupported -- all a Duty Station Agreement violation |
|---|---|---|
| Life cycle stipend | 16,500 | 0 unsupported -- all paid to employees not on FHFA's rolls |
| One-time out-stationed stipend | 12,800 | 0 unsupported -- all a Duty Station Agreement violation |
| Professional licensing & certification | 6,692 | $5,055 unsupported |
| Professional liability insurance | 4,126 | $3,684 unsupported |
| Gym membership | 900 | $600 unsupported |
| TSA Pre-check | 241 | $241 unsupported (all of it) |
Out-stationed and life cycle stipends carried the biggest dollar risk
The largest questioned amounts sat in the categories with no paperwork requirement at the point of payment. FHFA pays every employee "on FHFA's rolls" as of September 30 an automatic life cycle stipend -- no application needed -- and the found $16,500 paid to 11 employees who weren't confirmed on the rolls as of the relevant date. Out-stationed employees, authorized to work from home rather than an FHFA office, get a one-time $1,600 setup stipend and a $500 quarterly stipend, both conditioned on a signed Duty Station Agreement; FHFA couldn't show 8 of 21 one-time stipends had the required OHRM signature ($12,800 questioned), and couldn't produce a signed Agreement for 36 of the 78 employees in its quarterly-stipend sample -- 51 of 112 sampled payments, $24,431 questioned. Notably, the Division of Federal Home Loan Bank Regulation has its own written procedure requiring these checks, and the found FHFA wasn't following that procedure either.
The records-management failure has a stated cause: an FHFA official told the that its human-resources office had seen roughly 50-60 percent staff turnover over the prior four years, including recent voluntary-departure waves, and that this had left the office unable to locate some of the underlying records. The 's own conclusion is that a properly built recordkeeping system would not have let employee turnover erase that documentation in the first place.
FHFA agreed with all nine of the 's recommendations, but its written response pushed back on the framing: management explicitly disputed "the assertation that all of the exceptions are questioned costs that would require recoupment." The clarified its recommendation was only that FHFA determine the allowability of each questioned cost and act accordingly -- which may or may not mean clawing money back. FHFA's promised fixes, including a new written Standard Operating Procedure for reimbursements and stipends and a centralized recordkeeping system, carry deadlines of June 30 and September 30, 2026; the finding is independently confirmed, with the same $65,690 and $9,580 figures, in the 's own semiannual report to Congress⧉ covering the same period.
- FHFA paid $3,731,852 in employee reimbursements and stipends over 30 months; the questioned $65,690 of it (1.76%) as violating the Agency's own policy, $9,580 for missing documentation entirely.
- This is a repeat finding. A 2020 audit found the identical categories of control failure in FY2019; FHFA closed those recommendations by 2021, but the 2026 review found the same failure modes recurring in every subsequent year tested.
- FHFA's own internal risk office (OPPR) found roughly $16,250 in overpayments in an October 2024 review -- about a quarter of what the 's later, broader review would question -- including a duplicate stipend paid twice to one employee that was later recouped.
- Out-stationed and life cycle stipends -- the categories that require no paperwork at the point of payment -- carried the largest questioned amounts: $24,431 (quarterly out-stationed), $16,500 (life cycle), and $12,800 (one-time out-stationed).
- FHFA's own HR office lost track of supporting records, citing 50-60 percent staff turnover over four years; the 's view is that adequate recordkeeping should have made that turnover irrelevant.
- FHFA agreed with all nine recommendations but disputed that every exception requires clawing money back; corrective-action deadlines run through September 30, 2026, and the considers all nine recommendations open until then.
Figures are drawn from the FHFA Office of Inspector General's Compliance Review, FHFA Did Not Consistently Comply with Policies and Procedures for Paying Employee Reimbursements and Stipends (EVL-2026-002, issued March 30, 2026), read in full via direct PDF fetch from fhfaoig.gov, with an existing Wayback capture confirmed live at read time. The report's dollar totals and recommendation count are independently corroborated in the 's own Thirty-First Semiannual Report to Congress, covering the same period. A blind adversarial verifier, working from the primary documents alone with no access to this draft, independently checked every itemized fact; see verification.json.
The percentage of total spend questioned, the unsupported-cost share, and the OPPR-to- scale comparison are all this outlet's own arithmetic on the source document's own itemized numbers (methods and caveats in analysis.json); none of the three appears pre-computed in the source. Every finding in the underlying report is attributed to an office or role -- OHRM, DBR, DBR's Supervision Operations Branch, or an anonymized 'employee' or 'individual' -- never to a named person; no private individual is named as a wrongdoer anywhere in this piece.
Sources(3) ▾
- Federal Housing Finance Agency, Office of Inspector General, FHFA Did Not Consistently Comply with Policies and Procedures for Paying Employee Reimbursements and Stipends (EVL-2026-002) (2026-03-30) — FHFA-'s own compliance review is the sole source for: FHFA's Reimbursements and Stipends Policy (Policy 113) and Duty Station Policy structure; the FY2019 predecessor audit (AUD-2020-007) and the corrective actions FHFA closed in 2021; FHFA's Office of Planning, Performance, and Risk's October 2024 internal control assessment and its ~$16,250 in identified overpayments FY2021-FY2024, including a duplicate Examiner-in-Charge stipend recouped after exceeding $9,000; the $3,731,852 paid across 3,563 reimbursements and stipends October 1, 2022-March 31, 2025 (Table 1); the $65,690 in total questioned costs and $9,580 in unsupported costs, by category (Table 2 and Appendix II); the per-category sample sizes and documentation-gap rates for professional licensing, professional liability insurance, gym membership, and Pre-check reimbursements; the life cycle, out-stationed (one-time and quarterly), travel, and EIC stipend findings; the OHRM staff-turnover figure (50-60 percent over four years) cited for the records-management failure; the nine recommendations and FHFA management's written response, including FHFA's explicit dispute that every exception constitutes a recoupment-eligible questioned cost. fhfaoig.gov · original document
- Federal Housing Finance Agency, Office of Inspector General, Semiannual Report to Congress, October 1, 2025 through March 31, 2026 (Thirty-First Semiannual Report) (2026-04-30) — Used to corroborate, on an independently-loading second FHFA- document, that EVL-2026-002 questioned $65,690 (of which $9,580 was unsupported), that the review made nine recommendations, and that FHFA agreed with all nine -- confirming the compliance review is the 's live, final product rather than a draft or superseded figure, and situating it as one of two internal-Agency-operations reports (alongside AUD-2026-001, on legal-service payments) the issued in the same six-month reporting window. fhfaoig.gov · original document
- Federal Housing Finance Agency, Office of Inspector General, Report Fraud, Waste, or Abuse (OIG Hotline) (2026-07-20) — Used only to source the CTA hotline contact (cta.json). The same phone number, fax number, and mailing address also appear on EVL-2026-002's own back cover. fhfaoig.gov · original document
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The Federal Housing Finance Agency's Office of Inspector General⧉ reviewed how the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/FHLBank regulator handles its own internal money -- the $3,731,852 it paid employees in reimbursements and stipends across 3,563 payments between October 1, 2022, and March 31, 2025. Auditors questioned $65,690 of that as violating FHFA's own Reimbursements and Stipends Policy (Policy 113) or its Duty Station Policy, $9,580 of it because the Agency could not produce the paperwork to support the payment at all.