(The Center Square) – The CEO of the troubled King County Regional Homeless Authority says the organization will need new funding to hire staff to determine what happened to millions of dollars that went missing.
Kelly Kinnison said $500,000 was needed to hire an interim or external Chief Financial Officer and other accounting staff to track $8 million.
But then, minutes later, she told the Seattle City Council Committee on Friday that the amount needed might be much higher to address incomplete authority records.
A critical outside forensic audit in April said the $8 million might have to be written off because the authority could not account for how it spent the money.
Kinnison’s appearance before the Human Services, Labor & Economic Development Committee is the latest in the continuing saga over the future of the regional homeless authority that provides housing for the unhoused in Seattle and other parts of King County.
The authority has a yearly budget of around $200 million, with Seattle providing 60% of its funds.
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay must submit separate initial reviews by June 15 and final decisions by Aug. 1 on the organization’s fate.
Either Wilson or Zahilay could dissolve the organization with a year’s notice.
Kinnison opened up testimony on Friday, saying no fraud had been committed; instead, the problem was poor fiscal records.
She said that the $8 million had been spent on homeless services, but poor recordkeeping had prevented the authority from tracking it so far.
The critical audit of the homeless authority also found the authority ran a negative cash balance of as large as $44.7 million and $4.26 million was lost to administrative overspend, including interest payments that cannot be recovered.
Kinnison told the committee that, while the authority has launched a financial corrective plan, it can’t fully comply with suggested reforms.
Our financial department is understaffed,” she said. “At the moment, we’ve had a couple of recent losses, and in addition to needing more regular staff time to do our regular business, we lack some of the expertise that is needed to complete the corrected action internally.”
Kinnison said the organization needed an interim Chief Financial Officer and additional accounting staff, and than named the $500,000 figure.
Kinnison said the $500,000 was what the authority had previously spent to hire an interim CFO through a staffing agency, Robert Half.
The audit criticized KCRHA for previously spending $2.96 million dollars on Robert Half staffing through June 2025.
“As an example, we compared the Robert Half payments for the interim CFO contracted between November 2023 through December 2024 (11 months) and compared that to the cost for that same person and position, who was hired as an employee at the end of the contract,” the audit said.
The audit said KCRHA paid Robert Half $448,497 for the 11-months of the CFO contract. That same person was then hired at a yearly salary of $285,000, it said.
The audit also found no explanation for the expense policy for the unidentified Interim CFO. It said he was being reimbursed $9,019 for lodging, meals, and incidentals for 28 days between September and November 2024.
Why that person left is unclear. Kinnison didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Later on, during more than an hour of testimony, Kinnison said a high-level cash analysis was needed to understand how the authority may have lost track of the $8 million in missing funds.
But even then, she said it might be difficult to track the missing money.
“We need to understand in the early years the records might not be great,” she said.
Councilwoman Maritza Rivera told Kinnison that just because we are in 2026 doesn’t preclude the authority from providing detailed records from 2022.
“I wish we could do it differently,” said Kinnison, who became CEO in 2024.
The audit covered the authority’s finances from 2021 through mid-2025.
Kinnison said it was a matter of how much officials were willing to spend to track the $8 million and whether the cost would be worth it.
She said the 2022 records “were metaphorically in shoe boxes,” but records were readily available in later years when the authority improved its fiscal systems.