Let’s begin with details. The Washington State Auditor audits federal baby care funding in our state yearly. Up to now 4 years, we’ve not been in a position to audit it due to the state’s lack of document retaining.
It’s additionally a indisputable fact that till just lately, this work has not obtained a lot public consideration. Among the causes for the current spike in curiosity from the information media and members of the general public are distasteful, however extra accountability for day care spending in Washington is required.
Let me clarify.
We’re speaking about this now as a result of audits within the state of Minnesota did what audits are designed to do: They flagged gaps in oversight of public packages, and acceptable investigators stepped in.
Audits are accountability instruments; legal costs are in the realm of legislation enforcement. Simply final month, the U.S. legal professional’s workplace mentioned that billions of {dollars} meant for quite a lot of public providers in Minnesota might have been stolen via fraud schemes.
These costs are the results of work that has gone on for years. Sadly, the details and wish for accountability — in Minnesota and now in Washington — have been hijacked by problems with race that haven’t any place within the dialogue.
As Washingtonians, we all know accountability and prejudice are wholly incompatible.
Because the state auditor, I can inform you that my staff of almost 500 works to supply unbiased and fact-driven accountability throughout the state, each week of each month, producing 3,000 audits a yr. The Workplace of the Washington State Auditor has audited governments since our state’s founding in 1889.
At this time, our audit work consists of auditing the federal program that subsidizes baby care in our state, the Baby Care and Improvement Fund.
As our public experiences confirmed, we had not been in a position to totally audit this system for the earlier 4 years. As a result of the Division of Youngsters, Youth and Households didn’t monitor its spending with a stage of traceability that complied with federal necessities, we have been unable to decide whether or not that cash was spent in line with federal guidelines.
As a outcome, we questioned your entire program’s spending for fiscal years 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. In our most up-to-date State of Washington Single Audit, that meant questioning $416 million spent via the federal baby care program.
We query prices when an company doesn’t have ample documentation to assist its expenditures, or it has not complied with grant necessities. Doing so doesn’t essentially point out fraud.
We’ve produced a summary of the single audit, or you possibly can lookup the discovering, 2024-056, within the full report. Yow will discover these experiences and all different audits we publish on our web site. I encourage everybody to learn them for yourselves — we’ve a wealth of public data at sao.wa.gov, accessible to everybody.
Nonetheless, once we are unable to audit a public entity’s accounts, whether or not it’s the smallest irrigation/drainage district or the most important state program, we can’t ship the accountability the general public expects. We can’t advance our imaginative and prescient of accelerating public belief in authorities.
In gentle of that, I’ve excellent news for accountability relating to federal baby care subsidies.
Shortly after taking workplace, Gov. Bob Ferguson and DCYF Secretary Tana Senn ensured a rise in accountability for the division’s spending. It’s a indisputable fact that, for the primary time in 5 years, we can conduct a full audit of the Baby Care and Improvement Fund.
Due to that, this month we may — and did — guarantee Washingtonians {that a} full, unbiased audit of baby care subsidies is underway.
We anticipate to publish that work in about three months. We might decide there are points nonetheless to be addressed within the state’s oversight of kid care funding. Once more, that doesn’t essentially imply the state has been defrauded. We’ll watch for the details.
By submitting important public providers to the scrutiny of unbiased audits, we construct belief between the general public and their authorities.
That belief is crucial to the democratic beliefs we share as Individuals of each background. And that belief should all the time be based mostly on the rock-solid basis of truth.
