King County auditor made $900 million error in recent report

The very first sentence of a blockbuster King County auditor’s report released last month contained an eye-popping finding: The county’s Department of Community and Human Services awarded more than $1.5 billion in grant funding in 2023-24, up from $22 million in 2019-20.

That’s an increase of 6,700%. How could spending have increased so drastically?

The answer: It didn’t.

King County Auditor Kymber Waltmunson informed the Metropolitan King County Council on Tuesday of a significant error in the recent audit. DCHS grant funding actually rose from $922 million in 2019-20 to $1.8 billion in 2023-24, an increase of 95%.

That’s a big increase, but hardly on the scale of what had initially been reported in the audit.

The data was not comprehensive because, as a point-in-time snapshot of active contracts, it excluded grants that had expired prior to the date that the data was pulled in April 2025,” Waltmunson wrote to County Council members. “We are revising the data in the report.”

The audit has drawn significant media attention and has become an issue in the race for King County executive.

The review does not change the main thrust of the audit’s finding: That DCHS failed to properly oversee the grant money it was sending out, resulting in unapproved payments and possible fraud. The audit found DCHS consciously took on more risk as it worked to give grants to smaller organizations and those with limited experience or less fiscal oversight capability.

“Both the previously reported and revised data support the same conclusion that DCHS manages a high volume of community grants and that this volume has increased in recent years,” Waltmunson wrote.

But that spending, it turns out, has not increased nearly as rapidly as the auditor initially reported.

The auditor submitted the audit to County Executive Shannon Braddock’s office before publication. Braddock’s office, in its response to the audit, did not note or question the error and agreed with all 10 of the auditor’s recommendations.

The Seattle Times asked, last week, for an interview with the auditor to explain the reported rapid increase in grant spending. A spokesperson said then that the department was reviewing the data.

The county auditor on Monday, in an email to a retired DCHS leader shared with The Times, acknowledged an error in the report and said the department was reviewing the data.

“We are grateful to you for helping to identify data that was missing from our data set resulting in an error in our report,” Waltmunson wrote on Monday in the email. “We are going through a process of quality assurance, updating the report, and communicating the error and updated information.”

Waltmunson, who was appointed by the County Council, has been the county auditor since 2013. On Tuesday, she credited the retired leader with alerting the department to the mistake.

Amnon Shoenfeld worked for King County for more than three decades, including 11 years at DCHS, and retired in 2014 as director of the department’s mental health and substance abuse division.

Shoenfeld said he was appalled at the lack of oversight the audit found, but when he dug into the numbers he found they “didn’t compute.”

“That kind of increase was just impossible,” he said. “The $22 million just made no sense at all.”

He pointed to the county’s Mental Illness and Drug Dependency fund, a 0.1% sales tax that funds behavioral health programs, which he oversaw when he was at DCHS.

It’s just one of several funding sources DCHS uses to make grants.

The MIDD tax’s 2020 annual report reported spending $94 million on Prevention and Early Intervention, Crisis Diversion, and Recovery and Reentry programs. The vast majority of that funding, Shoenfeld said, would have been disbursed to nonprofit agencies.

So, just looking at that one funding source, grant spending in 2020 would have been much higher than the $22 million reported. The voter-approved Best Starts for Kids and Veterans, Seniors and Human Services levies also spent millions on grants in those years.

Best Starts for Kids reported spending a total of $100 million in 2020. It’s unclear exactly how much of that went to contractors but the levy spends most of its funding on grant payments.

“I’m not defending everything that my old department did,” Shoenfeld said. He specifically disagreed with the move to contract with what the audit calls “high risk” organizations that lack experience or oversight capabilities. “My concern is people see the outrageous numbers and just think we’re wasting all this money and that’s not at all the case, these are good programs.