Published 1:30 am Thursday, October 1, 2026
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EVERETT — A state audit of Snohomish County’s 2025 financials released Monday found two vulnerabilities in the county’s financial reporting procedures that could have led to errors.
In both cases, the county needed to strengthen certain documentation elements, spokesperson Kari Bray said in an email Tuesday.
“Once the County became aware of the gaps in required documentation, steps were taken to address them,” Bray wrote.
The first finding concerned funds the county received from the federal government through the Tulalip Tribes to improve fish habitat and migration, including culvert construction. The vulnerability related to more than $2 million the county used to pay 21 contractors, the audit says.
With these funds, the county was required to pay contractors “prevailing wages,” or what laborers in the region could expect to earn for similar work, Bray said.
“Prevailing wages were paid on these projects,” she said. “However, a specific clause about the wage requirement was not spelled out in the County’s written agreements with contractors.”
The county did not include a required wage rate table in the contract, according to the audit.
“An additional contract review step is now in place to ensure the clause is included in the future and that the County is collecting federal- or state-certified payroll reports, as needed,” Bray said.
The second finding concerned $489,597 of about $1.5 million in grant funds the county Department of Emergency Management, or DEM, received from Homeland Security. The money funded emergency response, training, outreach and more.
The grant required county staff keep detailed records of time spent and work done, ideally gathered in real time, Bray said.
“There was finance staff and leadership turnover at DEM, and the need to ensure detailed documentation for this project was not flagged,” she said.
In the audit, the vulnerability was marked as a “material weakness,” or a major flaw that creates a reasonable possibility of a financial misstatement. Without proper real-time documentation, the audit says the county cannot guarantee accurate compliance with the Homeland Security grant.
However, for both findings, the auditor will take no extra steps and review both conditions during the county’s regular audit next year, the report says.
The State Auditor’s Office is not an enforcement agency, spokesperson Adam Wilson said in a Thursday email.
“Our role is to report what we found,” he said. “After we report our findings, the grantor (Homeland Security) and the recipient (the county) may go through a process to resolve any concerns. We are not involved in that process.”
According to Bray, staff who charged their work to the Homeland Security grant went back and rebuilt the record based on project plans, written correspondence, calendar invites and more.
“The cross-reference showed that 100% of the work done by these staff was eligible for payment under the grant,” Bray said. “The state Emergency Management Division (the grantor ) agreed with the County that all costs were appropriate under the grant.”
Taylor Scott Richmond: 425-339-3046; taylor.richmond@heraldnet.com; Bluesky: <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/btayokay.bsky.social” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>@btayokay.bsky.social
