News

FRANKFORT, KY (March 30, 2026) - Kentucky Auditor Allison Ball released the second volume of the annual Statewide Single Audit of the Commonwealth of Kentucky (SSWAK II) for Fiscal Year 2025. This year's SSWAK II demonstrates the importance of an independent auditor and unfortunately shows the Commonwealth still has improvements it must make.

“This audit, once again, represents serious problems the Commonwealth must address to ensure it is protected from waste, fraud, and abuse," Auditor Ball said. “But the hard work of our auditors is paying off, as Kentucky is finally making strides toward completing overdue inspections of nursing homes after our office first brought this issue to light two years ago. This shows that all of the problems uncovered in our report can be fixed by following our recommendations."

Federal Funding Sources at Risk

Because of the gravity of the issues uncovered in SSWAK II, the following four federal funding sources are at serious risk of withholding if Kentucky does not fix those issues:

• Grants to States for Medicaid. These funds help support Kentucky Medicaid.   ​
  

• MaryLee Allen Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program. These funds help Kentucky, among other things: (1) prevent child maltreatment; (2) assist in ensuring a child's safety within the home; (3) assist in ensuring that reunification between a child and her family can occur in a safe and stable manner; and (4) support adoptive families.​
  
  
• State Medicaid Fraud Control Units. These funds help Kentucky investigate and prosecute Medicaid-participating provider fraud and patient abuse or neglect.
   
• State Survey and Certification of Health Care Providers and Suppliers (Title XVII) Medicare. These funds help Kentucky investigate Medicare-participating providers and suppliers to ensure they properly care for our elderly and other Medicare recipients.  

Issues Uncovered

SSWAK II noted several major issues within Kentucky's executive branch, including:

• The Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS) failed to comply with earmarking and level-of-effort tracking requirements to keep the public and federal government aware of its spending of MaryLee Allen Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program funds and efforts to promote the goals of that program.
  
  

• CHFS failed to properly oversee Kentucky's Medicaid program in several ways:
   
• As it has failed to do for the previous two fiscal years, CHFS failed to ensure that Kentucky's long-term care facilities received their federally mandated inspections in a timely manner. This failure jeopardizes the health and safety of Kentuckians in those facilities. After being a repeat finding for over three years now in SSWAK II, CHFS has finally taken steps to rectify the backlog of long-term care facility inspections it had allowed to linger.
   
• As we also discovered in our recent special examination uncovering $836 million in Medicaid Waste, CHFS has once again failed to remove at least 331 deceased individuals off of Kentucky Medicaid eligibility rolls.
   
• Just as we pointed out in last year's SSWAK II, CHFS has once again failed to ensure that multiple people cannot use the same social security number to obtain Kentucky Medicaid benefits.
  
  
• In addition to $836 million in Medicaid waste uncovered in our recent special examination involving payments for individuals who may not be Kentucky residents, CHFS also wasted Medicaid dollars by making 844 duplicate payments for Kentucky residents, totaling almost a million dollars.
  Kentucky's Department for Local Government and Department of Workforce Development failed to submit federally required transparency reports about its distribution of federal dollars.
  The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) failed to appropriately oversee the contractors it utilizes for state projects. More specifically, KYTC failed to appropriately monitor the payroll submissions of construction contractors and other contractors to ensure the contractors are performing the required work and paying federally required wages.  

###
Link to the report here​​

​