WASHINGTON - Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo said today that a new survey of HUD employees found that 70 percent believe the Department has made reinvention an important priority - the highest percentage of any of 22 federal agencies surveyed.

In addition, Cuomo said a new review by outside experts found that the Department's sweeping reinvention plan is being successfully implemented.

The employee survey was performed by the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, which is headed by Vice President Al Gore. The Vice President said: "Through REGO (the reinventing government initiative) - and thanks to the extraordinary leadership of Secretary Andrew Cuomo - we turned HUD around, and got it out of the office towers and back onto the street corners and in the communities."

The outside review of HUD's reinvention was performed by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and concluded that the management reform plan unveiled by Cuomo in June 1997 to improve HUD's performance is successfully moving forward on schedule.

Cuomo said: "The HUD management reform plan said its goal was to transform HUD from 'the poster child for inept government.' We've achieved that goal, and now we're turning HUD into the poster child for government reinvention and for outstanding service to the American people."

"I thank Vice President Gore for his extraordinary leadership on government reinvention at HUD and throughout the federal government," Cuomo said. "I thank talented and dedicated HUD employees across the country for their hard work to make our reinvention a success and for their strong vote of confidence in our reinvention efforts. All of us at HUD are working together as a team to continue to improve our performance."

The review by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP found that HUD has completed many of the key elements of reinvention and has made substantial progress toward the rest, including:

• Creating a new Enforcement Center headed by an FBI Special Agent to fight waste, fraud and abuse in HUD programs.

• Opening a Real Estate Assessment Center to perform physical and financial assessments of HUD-subsidized housing.

• Establishing a new corps of Community Builders who are serving in HUD offices around the country to help people, localities, businesses and groups better utilize HUD programs to revitalize America's communities.

• Reforming HUD's procurement system in several ways, including the creation of a Contract Management Review Board made up of senior HUD officials to promote more effective use of HUD's contracting dollars.

• Beginning to establish HUD Storefront Offices to provide consumer-friendly and accessible services to the American people and communities. The first Storefront opened in Washington, DC in May and five more are scheduled to open around the country in early 1999.

• Establishing two Troubled Agency Recovery Centers to help troubled public housing agencies improve their performance.

• Beginning to replace HUD's 89 outdated computerized financial information management systems - many unable to communicate with each other - with a new integrated system.

The release of the survey of HUD employees and the review by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP follows two reports issued earlier this year that found the historic HUD 2020 Management Reform Initiative launched by Cuomo is being carried out successfully.

• An evaluation of the HUD reinvention effort released in May by management expert David Osborne said HUD's management reform plan "as it is being implemented today represents one of the most ambitious, fundamental, and exciting reinvention plans in the recent history of the federal government." Osborne said in a report by the company he heads - The Public Strategies Group, Inc.: "In our opinion, if HUD continues down the road it is going today - and continues to refine its strategy along the lines suggested in this report - the agency that was a symbol for government scandal in the 1980s could very well be a model for reinvention in the 1990s."

• A related review released by Booz-Allen & Hamilton Inc. in March concluded that HUD has made "significant progress towards achieving the many management reforms that are critical to making the Department function effectively."