‘Frustrating and angering’: King County Councilmember Dembowski says ‘serious missteps’ led to DCHS fraud investigation

An investigation by The Seattle Times into the King County Department of Community and Human Services (DCHS) has raised serious questions about how King County is handling taxpayers’ dollars.

King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski told “The Gee and Ursula Show” the investigation was “frustrating and angering.”

Dembowski explained that the county’s independent auditor discovered major issues a couple of years ago, and wrote a report, but didn’t see any steps being taken to address the problems. The auditor then followed up with an alarming letter.

“It was a letter, in my time on council, like I’ve never seen,” he said. “She was raising serious red flags about problems with the program, problems with some of the grant recipients. And then the lack of accountability and action, and that’s generated some responses, including legislative and others.”

The Seattle Times’ investigation found DCHS ignored red flags about contractors misusing tax dollars. Despite internal complaints, anonymous tips, and even some employees raising red flags about possible fraud, DCHS continued to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to contractors who, in some cases, couldn’t show the work they were supposed to be doing or even prove where the money went. In one case, a county employee flagged what he believed was potential fraud, and then claimed he was fired just days later.

The lack of oversight led KIRO host Ursula Reutin to ask, “How is it that a department that gets that much money has zero accountability?”

“Well, I don’t think there is zero accountability,” Dembowski responded. “There clearly have been some very serious missteps, and we can look at what caused that.”

Serious red flags found in DCHS’ Best Start for Kids program

While The Seattle Times investigated DCHS’ grant program, Dembowski explained the auditor’s sampling occurred in DCHS’ Best Starts for Kids program, adding that it’s a shame the initiative’s intended purpose of helping kids is being shadowed by the department’s mistakes.

“It’s really a tremendous program. And one of the sad things about this is a lot of the good work that I think they do for young people, infants, children, young adults, is being seriously tarnished,” he said.

Best Starts for Kids helps fund school health clinics and supports new moms in getting a healthy start for their families, so fewer kids end up in jail.

“The whole purpose of this program, which is an $880 million, 6-year program in its second renewal, is to get kids off to a better start so they don’t show up at the other stuff we do at the county, the sheriff, the prosecutor, the jail, and all of the costs that go with that,” Dembowski said. “We’re trying to get people off to a good start, but it’s got to be run well.”

He noted King County will have a report coming out soon from a private accounting firm hired to review the program’s contracts.

“I think it can serve as the basis to take the next steps in terms of civil recoveries and perhaps even criminal cases,” Dembowski said.

‘We as a government swamped this department’: Dembowski says DCHS couldn’t keep up

KIRO host Gee Scott questioned whether DCHS’ errors were due to incompetence or a broken system.

“There is definitely some incompetence, and there are definitely components of a broken system,” Dembowski responded. “A broken system in that, we as a government swamped this department coming through COVID with all of those billions of federal dollars — literally billions that were delivered to us to keep the community going — in addition to standing up this revised Best Starts for Kids program, doing all the housing work they do. We put a lot of money, $1.8 billion, it kind of doubled in two years, and they didn’t keep up. They had staff turnover. They had leadership changes. There were a lot of contributing factors, but none of it excuses the stealing of money and the mismanagement of programs, and that we’ve got to fix.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to Gee and Ursula on “The Gee and Ursula Show” weekday mornings from 9 am to 12 pm on KIRO Newsradio.