Oregon’s largest county budgeted over $1.2 billion for contractors in 2023 to operate homeless shelters, addiction treatment programs, behavioral health services and more, but departments didn’t go far enough to monitor the entities doing that work and regularly paid them late, a new report shows. The lack of oversight has burned Multnomah County in the past.
The 48-page audit published Thursday — sparked by what county officials characterized as a half-million dollar overpayment to a shelter provider in 2022 due to “ineffective contract monitoring” — found that the county’s lackluster contract and invoice tracking could be costly.