By Erica C. Barnett
City Councilmember Maritza Rivera wants the City Auditor to do an audit of all Human Services Department contracts, she announced this week, in light of a damning King County audit that found evidence of waste, misuse of funds, and potential fraud in a 36-contract sample of King County Department of Community and Human Services contracts for youth services.
Rivera, one of several councilmembers whose 2023 campaigns included a generalized demand for the city to “audit the budget” (an overbroad campaign demand that, of course, never happened) said in a press release that “in light of the issues at the County, we would be remiss if we did not conduct our own due diligence.”
Many of the contracts the county’s auditor reviewed were with new organizations with little or no prior government contracting experience, landing them in the “high risk” group that made up about half the contracts DCHS signed with providers between 2019 and 2024. The audit found that DCHS “had not prioritized resources for financial stewardship” of these contracts and failed to catch instances of noncompliance, waste, and fraud.
Rivera’s office did not respond to detailed questions sent Thursday morning, including why she believes HSD contracts are more likely to be problematic than other city contracts (such as those at the Department of Transportation or SPD) and whether she planned to limit the scope of any future audit to city contracts with specific groups identified in the county’s audit. HSD has more than $300 million in contracts; the bulk of that is funding for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which has its own separate contracting process.
Typically, the city auditor’s office, which currently has five audit staff, does limited audits of programs and initiatives, not far-reaching audits of entire city departments. Recent audits have looked at the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections’ final building inspection process, Comcast’s compliance with the city’s Cable Customer Bill of Rights, and the city’s approach to maintaining and cleaning restrooms in parks.
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The city’s acting auditor, Arushi Thakorlal, said her office is currently “at capacity” through the fall, but said they’ll work with Rivera to figure out the scope of a general HSD contract audit if it moves forward. (The auditor is appointed by the council but functions independently).
The previous auditor, David Jones, established a method for prioritizing audits that Thakorlal said she’s continuing to follow: First, any audits that are required by law, such as annual reviews of non-police surveillance technology, have to be performed no matter what. Then, the office prioritizes audit requests from the council president and the head of the committee overseeing the subject of the proposed audit, in that order. Rivera is neither the council president nor the head of the council’s human services committee.
“If multiple council members support something, it moves toward the top of the list,” Thakorlal said. “Right now, I haven’t heard from other council members about this.” Thakorlal said she encouraged Rivera to work Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who heads the human services committee. Rinck told PubliCola she asked Rivera “for clarification on her request for an audit and shared what I understood about current contracting and auditing processes.”
Most of HSD’s contracts are reimbursable fee-for-service contracts: Contractors get paid after they spend money and submit invoices to the city. Most of the DCHS contractors in the King County audit, in contrast, received fixed monthly payments from the county and were supposed to reconcile what they spent the county by submitting detailed expense reports after the fact.
A spokeswoman for HSD, Caitlin Moran, said the department’s standard contract monitoring provides “improved levels of accountability and oversight” and said the department “routinely undergoes external audits by our federal and state funders as part of their standard fiscal oversight”; in 2025, a state audit requested by former city councilmember Sara Nelson looked at two years of contracts in HSD’s Community Safety division and did not identify any concerns, Moran said.
HSD’s internal controls, “as well as ongoing staff training and continuous improvement efforts to both our procurement and contracting processes, enable HSD to responsibly contract with community organizations who are critical partners in helping the City of Seattle build a strong social safety net that connects our most vulnerable residents to resources and services during times of need,” Moran said.