Housing and Urban Development spokespeople offered conflicting accounts of what Secretary Ben Carson knew about the furniture order. | Alex Wong/Getty Images FINANCE & TAX HUD's Ben Carson broke law with furniture order, GAO says

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson broke the law when he failed to report an order for a $31,561 dining room table set for his office as well as the installation of an $8,000 dishwasher in the office kitchen, the Government Accountability Office found in a report published Thursday.

Agencies are required to notify Congress of expenditures over $5,000 to furnish an executive’s office.


Carson canceled the table order after it surfaced in news reports in early 2018, and he appeared to blame the fiasco on his wife, Candy, in congressional testimony. HUD spokespeople offered conflicting accounts of what Carson knew about the order.

Congressional appropriators requested the GAO investigation.

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Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees HUD, called the debacle “another example of the Trump administration trying to cast aside the law if it doesn’t suit them.”

“I am also disturbed by the pattern of false statements and attempts to conceal this incident, mislead the public, and prevent Congress and the American people from seeing how taxpayer dollars are being mismanaged,” Reed said in an e-mailed statement.

HUD released a statement from its chief financial officer touting improved “financial controls” since Carson launched a task force to improve fiscal discipline in March 2018.

“In the year since we embarked upon this effort, we’ve made significant and measurable improvement to our financial controls, but we still have a lot of work ahead of us,” CFO Irv Dennis said.

“Our job is to make sure systems are in place to protect every taxpayer dollar we spend and to restore sound financial management and stability to the way we do business,” Dennis added.

