Washington state governments

A program intended to help people in low-income housing eventually buy their homes has yet to be used, according to a new performance audit by the Office of the Washington State Auditor.

The federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program is intended to encourage development of affordable rental housing, but a few program projects allow tenants to buy their homes. The Housing Finance Commission manages this program in Washington.

Medicaid provides needed health care for more than one in four people in Washington, at a cost of about $19.6 billion a year. However, Washington also pays millions of dollars for Medicaid coverage of people already insured by other states, according to a new performance audit by the Office of the Washington State Auditor.

More than a decade after voters approved legalizing recreational marijuana in Washington, the state still lacks a system able to track cannabis from production through processing to retail sale, according to a follow-up performance audit released today by the Office of the Washington State Auditor.

Originally published October 2, 2024

Updated October 4, 2024

Each month, Washington relies on the aging Agency Financial Reporting System to process $4.3 billion in payments. In less than a year, the state plans to move to a new administrative system, a necessary but immensely complex information technology project affecting more than 100 agencies.

The project is overseen by the One Washington program, which chose Workday, a cloud-based enterprise resource planning system, to modernize the state's administrative systems.

A Washington state employee misappropriated nearly $900,000 through fraudulent credit card purchases, the Office of the Washington State Auditor found in a fraud report released today. It is the largest internal misappropriation in a state agency in at least the last 15 years.

The report identifies $878,115 in misappropriations between 2019 and 2023 at the Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH).

Washington shellfish are enjoyed the world over; marinas connect people with the state’s beautiful stretches of water. Both can rely on publicly owned land under the waves, through aquatic land leases. 

A performance audit published today reviewed the processes for determining the lease rates for aquatic lands, and how those processes contribute to fairness for leaseholders and the state through consistency. 

Compare to 2023 ACFR summar

With limited supplies in greater demand, Washington needs to better understand current water system data to reduce the loss of drinkable water, according to a new performance audit by the Office of the Washington State Auditor.

The Department of Health is tasked with increasing the efficiency of the state’s 2,065 local municipal water systems through both customer-focused conservation efforts and minimizing the loss of water as it travels through the systems.