Washington state governments

Although rare, some Washington workers are employed by two state agencies at the same time, and the state can do more to ensure these instances are appropriately managed, according to a new performance audit by the Office of the Washington State Auditor.

Auditors reviewed dual employment in state agencies, in which one person holds two different positions. Out of 75,000 state workers, auditors identified 93 who were dual employed, with an average of six months of overlapping payroll payments.

The Washington State Patrol has effectively eliminated the state’s backlog of untested sexual assault kits, and now is testing nearly all kits within 45 days, according to a follow-up performance audit by the Office of the Washington State Auditor. 

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.