Cohen said she will use the auditing powers of her office to determine how the billions of dollars the state is investing on homelessness initiatives is addressing the crisis.
“People see and they are experiencing the homeless crisis no matter where you go in the state of California,” Cohen said. “They see tax dollars going out of their pocket, but the homeless crisis still persisting. They see the people on the street. I just talk about how an audit would be able to help them gather answers into these homeless programs that are underway. They’re relatively new and they have a high dollar, and an audit would tell us whether we’re doing a good job or a poor job.”
Chen also has said he would use the audit process to provide transparency into government spending on homelessness, which he says has gotten only worse with more funding.
“The state controller is the person responsible for making sure taxpayer money, our money, is spent as we’re told it will be,” he said in a video shot near an encampment in Los Angeles this year. “We need accountability for the money we’ve spent on homelessness to be able to figure out what programs are working and which ones unfortunately aren’t, so we can make the situation better, so we can finally solve this problem once and for all.”
Chen also proposed giving California programs letter grades to assess how taxpayer dollars are being used.
