Mayor, county executive will install own oversight in homelessness agency

Seattle and King County's top officials are installing their own oversight measures to get the region's homelessness agency on better financial footing after finding the agency's plan to do so lacking.

A critical audit of the authority released in April found significant financial shortcomings within the six-year-old agency. That same auditor said the King County Regional Homelessness Authority's plan to correct its financial failings won't solve the problems revealed in the audit, leaving the agency's future in continued doubt.

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said they will embed a team of independent financial analysts within the authority to provide more immediate oversight and accountability as lawmakers weigh whether to repair or dissolve the agency.

"It's clear that the agency needs to take more action to stabilize and course correct in the short term," Zahilay said in a statement.

The most eye-catching numbers in the audit had to do with $8 million in unaccounted spending, more than $6 million in administrative overspending and more than $1 million in interest payments.

But beneath those numbers was a story of deeper systemic failures - poor invoicing practices, lack of clear financial controls, shoddy record keeping and freewheeling access to accounting documents.

At one point, the agency dipped more than $44 million into the red - a number the audit concluded was out of step with other nonprofit and governmental agencies operating on similar models.

In the aftermath, officials with the agency were asked to draft a plan for correcting its failings.

The agency's corrective action plan grappled with its reported failings and promised more rigorous accounting systems, new approval processes for employee reimbursements, and regular work sessions with city and county officials.

At the same time, CEO Kelly Kinnison blamed the agency's founding structure for many of its issues.

(King County Regional Homelessness Authority) owns its internal failures; the region must jointly fix the shared operating model," Kinnison said in the report's opening.

That model relies on the agency writing checks to contractors that provide homelessness services and later seeking reimbursement from Seattle and King County. The model requires careful financial oversight that it has not conducted, according to the audit.

Now, analysts with firm Clark Nuber, which conducted the initial damning evaluation, say that plan comes up short in many places.

Though it is "substantive" in places, the proposal "does not yet provide sufficient assurance that the conditions identified in the forensic evaluation have been corrected or will be corrected within the proposed time frames," the firm found.

The regional homelessness authority was originally founded to streamline contracting processes for nonprofit service providers and get buy-in for solving the problem of homelessness from cities and towns across King County.

But from its launch in 2021, it has struggled with nonstop turnover among CEOs, failed to deliver on some of its top-line promises around homelessness in downtown Seattle, and frustrated service providers with clunky systems and slow reimbursement.

It has also repeatedly received poor marks from multiple audits for its accounting processes. While external factors are relevant, the homelessness authority leans on them too heavily to explain the financial issues, Clark Nuber said.

The level of debt carried by the agency, resulting in unrecoverable interest payments, "reflects a failure of cash-flow management practices rather than the structural consequences of the funding model itself."

Most concerning, Clark Nuber found, is the agency is saying it will take nine to 18 months to integrate new internal financial controls. That could mean more than a year of spending tax dollars without a safety net.

Additionally, the corrective plan does not acknowledge, let alone provide a plan for, tackling practices that led to $6.4 million in spending more than it was supposed to.

It also does not lay out a plan reconstructing accounting records prior to 2024 that the audit found were "largely untraceable.

The agency also seems to have ignored the audit's advice of a hiring freeze.

Clark Nuber analysts concluded the agency acted in good faith with its corrective action plan, found it was honest about its internal limits and has set the stage for productive dialogue with the county and city to fix its problems.

Still, Zahilay said in a statement that he and Wilson were unconvinced the plan was thorough enough to meet their expectations on a reasonable timeline.

When the initial financial evaluation was released, lawmakers from both Seattle and King County quickly filed mirroring resolutions to wind down the agency. Repairing its systems would require substantial time and money, and they were not convinced either would be well spent.

But momentum toward dissolution seems to have slowed as elected officials weigh the task of fixing what's broken. That, too, would likely cost millions and take up to a year, though some believe it would be less painful that tearing the whole thing down.

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This story was originally published June 9, 2026 at 6:41 AM.