Emergency Rental Assistance- Supporting Statement_Redirected Funds Form 20210322

Department of the Treasury

Information Collection Request – Supporting Statement

Emergency Rental Assistance Program

OMB No. – 1505-0266

A. Justification

1. Circumstances necessitating the collection of information

Justification for Emergency Processing:

On December 27, 2020, the President signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (the “Act”). Division N, Title V, Section 501(a)(1) of the Act provides $25 billion for the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) to make payments to States (defined to include the District of Columbia), U.S. Territories (Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa), Indian tribes or tribally designated housing entities, as applicable, the Department of Hawaiian Homelands, and certain local governments with more than 200,000 residents (collectively the “eligible grantees”) to provide financial assistance and housing stability services to eligible households.

Section 501(c) requires the eligible grantees to use the funds to provide financial assistance and housing stability services to eligible households. Section 501(b)(1)(A) provides that not later than 30 days after December 27, 2020, the Secretary shall pay each eligible grantee. Treasury intends to begin making payments as soon as possible given the urgent need for the funds being disbursed.

Under the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program, eligible local governments with more than 200,000 residents may elect to receive an ERA award directly from Treasury. If an eligible local government elected to receive an ERA award its allocation of award funds is deducted from the award amount that their State would have otherwise received under the ERA program. Some local governments that received an ERA award from Treasury have now decided to cancel their ERA awards and want to directly transfer their award funds to their respective states for the States to administer the ERA program.

To facilitate this process and ensure that Treasury’s records accurately reflects the cancellation of the local government’s ERA award, and the modification of the State’s ERA award, local governments and its respective State must complete the Redirected Funds Form and provide it with the relevant supporting documentation to Treasury.

Due to the need to expeditiously document the cancellation of the local government’s ERA award and the modification of the State’s ERA award in Treasury’s records as well as other government-wide databases, such as USASpending.gov, Treasury requests emergency processing for the Redirected Funds form.

Acceptance of Award Terms Form

An eligible grantee that elects to receive payment under the Emergency Rental Assistance program must complete and sign a form that will indicate its agreement to the award terms, including, most important the requirement to comply with reporting requirements established by Treasury to allow Treasury to comply with its reporting requirements under section 501(g), to repay excess funds after September 30, 2021, and to allow Treasury to comply with its reallocation requirements under section 501(d). Treasury does not have rulemaking authority with respect to this program, so it must obtain the agreement of eligible grantees to require them to comply with these provisions.

Recipient Payment Information Form

In order to ensure proper payment by Treasury, each eligible grantee must supply basic identifying and bank routing information. This information should be readily available to officials completing the form.

ERA Redirected Funds Form

The ERA Redirected Funds Form will be used by local government grantees that no longer wish to implement an Emergency Rental Assistance program. The form will document the transfer of ERA funds and legal responsibilities therein from the local governments to their respective State government. The form must be signed by both the chief executive of the local government and an authorized official of the State government. The completed and signed form as well as a copy of the ACH or wire transfer must be submitted to Treasury as evidence of the transfer, cancellation of the local government’s ERA award, and modification of the State’s ERA award. We estimate a small percentage of local governments will choose to transfer the ERA funds therefore we expect to receive no more than 30 forms.

2. Use of the data

The information reported will allow Treasury to ensure proper payments to the eligible grantees, accuracy of agency records as well as to comply with any reporting, recordkeeping, and transparency requirements under the Act.

3. Use of information technology

Treasury will manage the submission process with the use of existing and widely available technology such as a web portal and e-mail.

4. Efforts to identify duplication

The information collections are under new statutory mandates. The information is not known to overlap with any other data collected under any other information collections at Treasury. Furthermore, the information collection is tailored to leverage data that already exists and require only additional data that is necessary.

5. Impact on small entities

This collection of information will minimally affect small entities. However, Treasury will attempt to minimize burden on small entities to the greatest extent practicable.

6. Consequences of less frequent collection and obstacles to burden reduction

Treasury will collect only the information required to make any payments to the eligible grantees and update its records to accurately reflect the status of grantees’ awards. The eligible grantees will submit a limited amount of information that should be readily available to the entity in the ordinary course of business. If the eligible grantees are unable to provide their completed recipient payment information form and acceptance of award terms form, Treasury would not be able to make payment to those eligible grantees. Treasury will not be able to cancel the local government’s ERA award, modify the State’s award, and update its records if the local government grantee transfers its award funds to its State without submitting a completed Redirected Funds Form and the relevant supporting documentation to Treasury.

7. Circumstances requiring special information collection

There are no special circumstances that require the collection to be conducted in a manner inconsistent with OMB guidelines.

8. Solicitation of comments on information collection and justification for expedited processing pursuant to 5 C.F.R. § 1320.13

This ICR is being submitted under emergency clearance procedures in order to comply with statutory deadlines and expedite payments to eligible grantees. As such, advance public notice and comment is not possible.

9. Provision of payments to respondents

No payments or gifts are provided to respondents.

10. Assurance of confidentiality

Information collected will be kept confidential to the extent appropriate and consistent with the Freedom of Information Act and other applicable laws.

11. Justification of sensitive questions

No sensitive questions will be asked of eligible grantees.

12. Estimate of the hour burden of information collection.

The Recipient Payment Information Form, Acceptance of Award Terms form, ERA Redirected Funds Form and all associated Recordkeeping burden estimates are as follows:

Reporting	# Respondents	# Responses Per Respondent	Total Responses	Hours per response	Total Burden in Hours	Cost to Respondent ($47.50 per hour*)
Acceptance of Award Terms Form	1,150	1	1,150	0.25 (15 minutes)	288	$13,680
Recipient Payment Information Form	1,150	1	1,150	0.25 (15 minutes)	288	$13,680
ERA Redirected Funds Form and Recordkeeping	30	1	30	1 hour	30	$1,425
Total	2,330		2,330		606	$28,785

* Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Accountants and Auditors, on the Internet at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/business-and-financial/accountants-and-auditors.htm (visited December 30, 2020). In 2019, the median pay for accounts and auditors was $34.40/hour. To account for the fully-loaded employer cost of employee compensation, the median pay is increased by 38%, resulting in a fully-loaded wage rate of $47.50. According to BLS’s Employer Cost for Employee Compensation from September 2020 (released on December 17, 2020: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf), employers provided 38% of total employee compensation in the form of non-wage compensation (i.e., benefits such as paid leave, health insurance, etc.) for state and local government workers.

13. Estimated total annual cost burden to respondents  

There are no annualized capital/startup costs for the eligible recipients to provide the information in the form or certification.

14. Estimated cost to the federal government.

As this is a new program being set up in response to emergency circumstances, Federal costs have not been estimated yet.

15. Reasons for change in burden

This collection of information is a new statutory requirement. With this request, we are adding an ERA Redirected Funds Form, which will increase the burden hours by 30 hours since the previous approval.

16. Plans for tabulation, statistical analysis and publication

Treasury plans to publish the data for disbursements.

17. Display of the expiration date for OMB approval

Treasury plans to display the expiration date for OMB approval of the information collection on all instruments.

18. Exceptions to submission requirements

There are no exceptions to the submission requirements.

Part B. Describe the use of statistical methods such as sampling or imputation.

This collection does not employ statistical methods.