Streamlining income verification for application processors in Kentucky increased application approval rates by at least 7 percentage points
 At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly a fifth of renters were at risk of eviction. Housing instability was especially high among renters with low incomes and renters who identified as people of color. In response, the U.S. Department of the Treasury administered the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) programs, which collectively provided over $46 billion to state, local, territorial and Tribal governments to prevent eviction and housing instability.
ERA provided direct cash assistance to eligible renters, landlords, and utility providers to assist with rent, utilities, and other housing-related expenses. When the procedures used to verify eligibility caused a bottleneck in distributing assistance, Treasury encouraged streamlining income verification procedures. In June of 2021, the Kentucky Housing Corporation's (KHC) ERA program, Healthy at Home Eviction Relief Fund, switched from having application reviewers examine a complex set of documents to verify an applicant’s income to using the applicant's neighborhood income as proof of income eligibility (known as a fact-specific proxy, FSP), thus streamlining their income verification process.
We partnered with KHC to understand if streamlining this process could broaden access to ERA assistance and found that using the FSP increased the approval rate by between 7.5 and 13.2 percentage points from a baseline approval rate of 42.5% of applications in non-FSP ZIP codes. We estimate that FSP caused the approval of up to 9,500 applications from FSP ZIP codes, and note that streamlining the income verification process was equally effective for applicants who identified as people of color as they were for people were living in rural areas, or those who had extremely low incomes.
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Recent blogs featuring OES
Actionable Learning about Economic Recovery: Over the past few months, OES and collaborators have been featured in two blogs on evaluation.gov. One blog, "Actionable Learning about Economic Recovery", highlights our robust partnership with the U.S. Department of the Treasury on over 10 evaluations with a significant focus on using the results to inform program implementation. In this piece, you can read about how OES and Treasury partnered on an earlier descriptive study of equity of the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program to understand how the demographic profile of renters who were eligible for ERA compared to the demographic profile of renters who received ERA.
Building the Foundation Needed to Achieve the Evidence Act’s Potential for Transforming Federal Policymaking: As the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 celebrates its 5th anniversary, evaluation leaders including OES Director Kelly Bidwell, Joseph Clift (USDA/FNS), Mary Hyde (AmeriCorps), and Lauren Supplee (HHS/ACF/OPRE) co-authored a blog "Building the Foundation Needed to Achieve the Evidence Act’s Potential for Transforming Federal Policymaking". In this piece, they share their recipes for success in building and strengthening evaluation offices across the federal government and insights on how to establish structures to support that success.
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