Watchdog uncovers even more problems with the government's Puerto Rico relief efforts

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has attracted controversy for its supposed mishandling of Puerto Rico disaster relief after Hurricane Maria. Yet the department's top watchdog says it has faced trouble dissecting just how far that mishandling extends.

In a letter to HUD Secretary Ben Carson sent Monday, the department's inspector general said "delayed access to departmental records" has caused major delays in her own oversight efforts. Her attempts to probe HUD's Puerto Rico handling have since "diluted, become stale, or worse, halt[ed] entirely," Inspector General Rae Oliver Davis wrote in the letter obtained by The Washington Post.

As Oliver Davis cited in her letter, "average wait time for HUD electronic records has increased from approximately 95 calendar days in 2017 to 151 calendar days in 2018," the Post writes. Throughout 2018, in fact, 20 requests for records actually took over six months to be answered, the letter said. And when government watchdogs can't access that information, it stops the inspector general's office from completing "its statutory mission to detect and prevent fraud, waste, and abuse," Oliver Davis continued.

This isn't the inspector general's first crackdown on supposed HUD incompetence. In a December 2017 letter, the inspector general's office said HUD's response times “fail to comply with the law requiring timely OIG access to all department information.”

Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017, but recovery efforts are far from over, and a disaster relief funding bill that would benefit the island continues to stall in the Senate. Read more about the HUD's oversight woes at The Washington Post.