Investigation points to ‘glaring conflict of interest’ in King County department

Last year, the King County Auditor's Office released a damning report about lax financial oversight at the Department of Community and Human Services. It found potential fraud and numerous improper payments to contractors for four youth programs.

A new investigation by the Seattle Times has found additional signs of possible financial impropriety. KUOW’s Kim Malcolm talked to investigative reporter Lulu Ramadan about her reporting.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: You and your colleague David Gutman worked together on this investigation. Tell us about the focus. Where did this start?

Lulu Ramadan: That high-profile audit of the Department of Community and Human Services really triggered a lot of scrutiny. We've been looking closely at how contractors are using money in the community and how the county oversees that money to ensure that it’s used properly.

Along the way, we found a story about a King County employee who had been investigated for overseeing more than $800,000 in payments to members of her family. It was part of this larger look at King County and how oversight gaps have existed for a while, and all of a sudden, they're starting to find some problems.

Tell us more about this former employee, Yolanda McGhee. Your piece points to a “glaring conflict of interest.” What did you find?

Yolanda McGee was overseeing a program that offered mentorship to Black and brown youth in the community. Throughout the course of the program, she directly managed contracts and contractors that then paid members of her family, either directly or through subcontractors.

It raised some serious questions about a potential conflict of interest, but it also turned out that King County officials had a complaint and signs along the way indicating that McGhee was overseeing such payments but hadn't been properly investigated and hadn't directed it to the right department. This went on for about five years before the county launched an investigation.

Did you talk to McGhee herself about your reporting?

We reached out to McGhee to ask for an interview and to ask her to answer some detailed questions, but she declined. She did offer a statement by email defending herself, saying that she had made the appropriate disclosures and that she had not violated county rules.

The reality is she had made some disclosures along the way, but King County has a pretty interesting ethics oversight system that has some gaps in it that allowed for some of these signs to slip through the cracks. That's something we explored with our reporting as well, how the county has overseen its ethics and employee allegations of misconduct and where some of those weaknesses contribute to oversight gaps.

You point toward ethics standards that appear to have been weakened over time at King County. Tell us a bit about what happened there.

We looked at how the county oversees ethics going back to the 1990s, which is around the time when the county split up its ethics oversight between different bodies, and in the process took away some investigative authority for, particularly, its appointed board of ethics and an internal ethics program.

It's a really complicated setup, but experts in government ethics oversight say the gold standard is having one unified body that oversees all aspects of ethics. For instance, training supervisors and employees on how to adhere to ethics standards but also how to catch signs of potential ethical misconduct, financial disclosures from government employees, and investigating when there are any allegations from internal whistleblowers or from citizens in the community.

In this case, back in 2020, the county did receive a complaint about Yolanda McGhee saying she had that “glaring conflict of interest,” but nothing really came of that complaint.

Along the way, they also stripped resources from their ethics program. One example we have in the story is in 2009 King County had 79 ethics presentations and trainings. Last year, they had none.

Are there any signs that county leaders are trying to address the issues here and fix the problem?

It does seem like across King County there are some real efforts to change a lot of these oversight gaps. I think the audit in particular was really a reckoning for King County officials, and [there are] already some policy changes to strengthen the way they oversee contractors and the way they investigate or ensure complaints or allegations of fraud are investigated.

In this case, there are also some departments that are trying to improve their ethics policies, so something like this might not slip through the cracks again.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.