Announcements

For the first time in three years, the annual Washington Finance Officers Association conference will be live and in person Tuesday, Sept. 13 through Friday, Sept. 16 at the Greater Tacoma Convention Center. As always, the WFOA conference is a unique, once-a-year opportunity to attend valuable training sessions, find out about the latest and greatest auditing and accounting resources, and share tips and advice with financial experts and your colleagues.

For planning and budgeting purposes, we recently notified our clients that SAO's hourly billing rates as of Jan. 1, 2023, will be as follows:

The hourly rate for auditors in travel status will remain at 75 percent of the applicable hourly rate.

Earlier this summer we announced SAO would be phasing in SecureShare, our new data-sharing tool for audits. Starting Sept. 1, SecureShare will be our primary tool for exchanging audit information with state and local governments.

As part of our transition, we are in the process of emailing clients with invitations to join their dedicated share space in SecureShare. The invitation email will be from SAOSecureShare [at] sao [dot] wa [dot] gov. Please add this email address to your organization's “safe sender” list to ensure you receive it.

The Office of the Washington State Auditor is excited to announce the addition of school district financial data to our Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT). Before we make this data available to the public, we are inviting school districts to preview their data and become familiar with how to use the tool.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Aug. 8, 2022

OLYMPIA – The Office of the Washington State Auditor's annual audit of federal money spent in the state revealed 61 areas of concern across 21 federal programs. Because of a lack of documentation, auditors were unable to audit one entire program, calling into question at least $271 million in spending.

These issues and more can be found today in an accessible summary of the extensive audit report by the State Auditor's Office (SAO).

Here is a printable version of the infographic.

SAO's resource database offers dozens of free guides, checklists, best practices and tools to help Washington governments improve their internal controls, grant management, procurement practices, financial reporting and cybersecurity. And last week, we replaced it with something better!

Brandi Pritchard, SAO's Assistant Director of Local Audit and Special Investigations, receiving the 2022 Hubbard Award at the 33rd Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference in Nashville.

Local governments and state agencies soon will have access to SAO's SecureShare—a safe, simple tool for exchanging data during audits.

SAO developed SecureShare after consultation with Washington Technology Solutions (WaTech), the state's IT agency. Our programmers and technicians then worked with Microsoft to develop SecureShare, a customized application built on trusted, reliable technology.

Employees and projects from the Office of the Washington State Auditor (SAO) were recently honored at the annual conference of the National State Auditors Association (NSAA) in Atlanta, Georgia.

Scott DeViney, who serves as Assistant Director of Quality Assurance at SAO, was honored with a President's Award for his contributions to NSAA's 2021 Peer Review Training Taskforce. With a small group of volunteers from other state audit offices, DeViney developed a series of training videos on the peer review process.