Announcements

As the authority on auditing public funds in Washington state, we’ve prepared the following FAQ to address some of the most common questions people may have about federal child care funds. Our goal with this FAQ is to be transparent and informative about the role of the Office of the Washington State Auditor on this issue of public concern. State Auditor Pat McCarthy also released two statements earlier this month on this topic:

The Office of the Washington State Auditor has investigated many losses of public funds that governments could have detected sooner – if only someone had looked at their bank statements. Whether you are a finance professional, a department head, or even an elected or appointed official, regularly reviewing your monthly statements can greatly increase the odds of deterring and detecting fraud.

The Office of the Washington State Auditor is conducting new “police training and certification audits” to determine if law enforcement agencies fully comply with officer conduct reporting requirements.  

The State Auditor’s Office invites you to scroll through an interactive report of our activities during fiscal year 2024. We are proud of our efforts to work with local governments and state agencies to ensure accountability and transparency for public resources. 

The Port of Peninsula mismanaged its revenues, resulting in financial disarray, and failed to follow parts of the Open Public Meetings Act, the Office of the Washington State Auditor reported today.

The State Auditor’s Office has been closely monitoring actions concerning the Financial Data Transparency Act (FDTA), which was passed into law at the end of 2022. The act seeks to modernize the collection and dissemination of financial data by federal financial regulators by requiring information submitted to the agencies to be in a machine-readable format.    

Washington colleges and universities accept nearly all the college-level credits students earn in high school – if the students follow through on a crucial step in the transfer process, according to a report released today by the Office of the Washington State Auditor.

The clerk-treasurer of a small city in the Cascades misappropriated more than $900,000 in public funds over nearly a decade, despite warning signs that improper activity was occurring, the Office of the Washington State Auditor found in a fraud report issued today.

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.