By Erica C. Barnett
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s governing board, made up of elected officials from around the region, will meet today for a briefing and discussion on a damning forensic evaluation into the agency’s finances. The audit found potential misuse and commingling of restricted funds, spending that could not be accounted for, casual accounting practices, and lack of oversight and internal controls to protect against waste, abuse, and fraud.
The report covered a period ending in July 2025, when the agency’s cash balance was negative by $44.7 million. A few months after the audit began, agency CEO Kelly Kinnison laid off 13 staff, including the general counsel and chief financial officer. Neither position has been filled. At the same time, Kinnison hired five new staff, including three top executives, offsetting some of the savings from axing the agency’s attorney and the executive overseeing its finances.
Elected officials issued a flurry of statements ranging from alarm to calls for the KCRHA’s dissolution on Wednesday. Four Seattle-area leaders who expressed grave concerns—King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, and Seattle City Councilmembers Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Dionne Foster—are on the governing board.
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In advance of today’s meeting, KCRHA’s Associate Director of Strategy, William Towey—who was among the new executives Kinnison hired last October—sent an email to KCRHA staff assuring them that the agency has “made meaningful progress [to] bring transparency to where we needed to improve and to help guide the work ahead.”
“Core operations are stronger, invoicing is now completed on time with significantly improved accuracy, we have implemented regular monthly financial close processes, and we have strengthened oversight of spending, including purchase cards”—spending by individual staffers that was done with little accountability or oversight, the audit found. “At the same time, the audit makes clear that more work is required, and we are already taking action to address those areas.”
Towey’s letter to staff emphasized that, “[i]mportantly, the audit did not find evidence of fraud or misuse of funds.” However, the audit explicitly says that the failure to find “large-scale fraud in the samples reviewed” does not mean a clear bill of health; “due to limitations in internal controls, the risk of fraud, waste, and abuse remains,” the audit notes.
Towey told KCRHA staff Kinnison herself requested the audit, a claim that sources inside the city as well as former KCRHA staff have disputed, saying that Kinnison’s former deputy, Simon Foster, requested it after discussions with the Seattle Human Services Department. (Foster was among the 13 laid-off staff.)
In a formal complaint last August, then-CFO James Rouse (one of the 13 staff let go last October) said Kinnison had not initiated the review and seemed unaccountably dismissive about the implications of a forensic audit, which is typically done when there’s a suspicion of wrongdoing, such as fraud.
Ordinarily, an agency under audit would have the opportunity to respond in writing to the audit and have the response released as part of the audit itself, but that didn’t happen in this case. Kinnison is expected to respond to the audit findings verbally at the KCRHA’s board meeting this afternoon.
One question that’s unlikely to come up at the meeting is what responsibility the elected officials on the board, as well as the KCRHA’s two main funders, the city and King County, had for ensuring its spending was in order and its accounting practices met basic standards. In 2024, the city and county gave the governing board more authority, but the officials on the board never took a particularly active role in questioning or overseeing the agency or its budget. Instead, the board generally rubber-stamped the budget after viewing a PowerPoint presentation, effectively ceding authority to the CEO and staff to hold themselves accountable.
Foster was also one of the worst culprits of the spending on “Clothes and Furniture” so that’s hilarious.
I requested the receipts on this in March 2025 via public records, with no insider access and no budget. Francis & Company, the firm KCRHA paid more than $1 million for “accounting,” explicitly does not conduct audits. Robert Half charged up to $177 an hour for an interim CFO. A 22% placement fee, roughly $19,800, was paid to recruit a single federal grants accountant. It didn’t require a forensic audit to know something was terribly wrong there.
But this isn’t the root cause of what is wrong with the KCRHA. It’s not “startup conditions” or the pandemic or a complex funding model either, as they keep broadcasting. It is the unshakable belief that they are too important to fail, too sophisticated to be questioned, and too essential to be held accountable.
I’ve watched two Seattle mayors bypass them in their efforts to address homelessness. I’ve watched them post misinformation on social media about studies they didn’t bother to read, and I called it out publicly every single time. I’ve documented six specific Housing First fidelity failures in King County and literally handed them the book on how to fix it. They never opened it. They didn’t think they needed to. They are the experts after all. They have the data and the resources. They have it all figured out…except the finances, obviously, and the willingness to learn from the people actually doing the work.
The Continuum of Care is supposed to convene the region’s partners and coordinate response across the system. The KCRHA’s role was to staff it. Nothing more. Instead, they hosted webinars and talked at us like they had something important to say and called that coordination. The CoC Board has openly discussed replacing them as collaborative applicant, and HUD has repeatedly flagged their dysfunction. Their own charter working group watched a draft go out for public comment before the committee had even finished revising it, and when the CoC Board voted to provide our agency with HMIS access after the KCRHA denied us, they willfully ignored the vote because they disagreed. The CoC Board are their bosses. They overruled the body they were created to serve because they decided their judgment mattered more than the Board’s authority. The amount of hubris is just off the charts.
While our emails and requests for fair treatment fell on deaf ears, we were in the International District enrolling clients in our program that their System Navigators had promised a year of housing to and never followed through on because the KCRHA fired them all. They fired the people they promised would earn a living wage, people who sacrificed their vouchers for a chance at dignified, purpose-driven work, all because they couldn’t figure out how to bill Medicaid. Something that took us less than a year to master. And we are the ones they decided shouldn’t have HMIS access. What a joke. They couldn’t do the most basic operational work, so they eliminated the people who depended on them and called it a programmatic decision.
I wrote a report about the financial analysis I conducted on those public records back in early 2025. I concluded it with this, and I’ll conclude this comment with it too:
“The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) appears to be run by a small group of well-paid individuals who lack the competence to fulfill the agency’s core functions. It is unclear whether the agency has proactively chosen to outsource its essential functions to this handful of expensive consultants, or if it is unable to attract, recruit, or maintain a competent workforce. Either way, administrative costs are being inflated and institutional expertise needed for effective, long-term solutions to homelessness is clearly non-existent.
The consequences of these shortcomings are starkly evident in the Seattle region, where chronic homelessness has soared to become the highest in the nation. The visible increase in people living on the streets underscores the failure of a leadership structure ill-equipped to address the complex challenges of housing instability. Paying top executives hundreds of thousands of dollars each, despite their inability to move the needle on a growing crisis, is a misuse of public funds and a disservice to our most vulnerable neighbors.”
History will look at KCRHA as a performative waste of tax payer dollars.
For context, it’s worth noting that the KCRHA has an annual budget of over $200 million. The audit covered 2021–2025. An overview of the 2025 budget, where the money came from, and how it was spent can be found here: https://kcrha.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/KCRHA-2025-Annual-Budget-REVISED_12.19.24.pdf This is not to excuse poor accounting and leadership turmoil at KCRHA, but it is important keep in mind that they have been funneling a lot of money to programs that address homelessness.