‘It’s really bad news’: DCYF asks for more money after $2M in overpayments found

A recent audit of the Department of Children, Youth, and Families revealed $2 million in overpayments from the $10 million that was audited.

Senator John Braun joined “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio to reiterate that the overpayments could extend further, possibly even to hundreds of millions of dollars, due to 20% being overpaid in the small sample size being audited.

“What the auditor found, and frankly, good for them, but it’s really bad news. They found that one of our agencies, DCYF, audits a very small portion of the payments they make,” Braun said. “They make 1,000s of payments every year, and found alarming problems with overpayment, both in the quantity of overpayment and the amount of money. Just put it in perspective, they audited $10 million. Now, this is an agency that spends billions of dollars, but auditing $10 billion found over $2 million in overpayments. If you extrapolate that out, that could be hundreds of millions of dollars in overpayments.”

DCYF, with 500 administrators, employs only six auditors

Myers noted that even the small percentage of what was audited proved to be a massive miscalculation; no real resolutions in the DCYF process have been announced.

“Sadly, it’s not clear to me yet that they’re taking any actions; their immediate response was, ‘Hey, we need more money so that we can do a better job of auditing ourselves,’ which is absolutely insane,” Myers said. “This is an agency that has grown by hundreds of employees over the last few years. It’s got an administrative group that’s over 500 people. Yet they can only seem to afford six people to audit their books; that seems like the wrong priorities. The idea that we should send them more money to audit themselves because they’re doing such a poor job is maddening.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

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