Want to check where your homelessness tax dollars go, or report suspected fraud? See the box at the end of this story.
LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) advanced nearly $2.8 million to a Culver City nonprofit during the 2025-26 fiscal year — after two separate audits had already found the agency could not document where millions of dollars in similar payments had gone.
The nonprofit was Home At Last. Its founder, Michael Young, 46, of Baldwin Hills, was arrested Wednesday morning on a federal wire fraud charge accusing him of diverting more than $7.5 million from Los Angeles homelessness programs. He has not entered a plea. The charge is an allegation; Young has not been convicted.
The payments came during what is almost certainly the agency’s last year handling this money at all — a point taken up further down, and the reason this case matters beyond one nonprofit.
Six people have been arrested in federal cases alleging fraud and corruption involving Los Angeles-area homelessness programs in the past year.
What LAHSA is, and what an advance is
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA, is a joint city-county body created in 1993 that for decades distributed most of the public money Los Angeles spends on shelter and homeless services — more than $800 million a year in federal, state, county and city funds. Both governments oversee it, which is why the accountability question here lands on both.
The payments at the center of this story were advances — money handed to a contractor up front, before beds are filled or services delivered, rather than reimbursed afterward once someone has verified the work.
Advances get cash to a provider quickly, which matters when a shelter has payroll due. They also mean public money is out the door before anyone confirms what it bought. That is the mechanism the audits flagged, and it is the mechanism prosecutors say Young exploited.
What prosecutors allege
According to the federal complaint, Young used a web of shell corporations, fake bids, forged signatures and fraudulent invoices to misappropriate public funds. Prosecutors say the money paid for:
Michael Young
Photo Courtesy United States Department of Justice
“The taxpayers did not sign up to fund this nightclub,” Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division said Wednesday.
Home At Last took in more than $118 million in public money since 2019 — from LAHSA, the city, the county and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. LAHSA alone paid the nonprofit more than $75 million, roughly 64 cents of every dollar the organization received from any source.
Set the alleged diversion against that total and it comes to about six cents of every dollar. Put another way: $7.5 million is what roughly 125,000 Los Angeles County households pay into the county homelessness sales tax in a year, at the roughly $5 a month the tax costs an average household.
A second arrest, and a connected case
Federal agents arrested a second person the same morning. Lakiya Malone, 48, of South Los Angeles, an employee of Special Service for Groups, is charged in a 21-count indictment alleging she took more than $180,000 in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for housing referrals — including referrals for “ghost clients” whose files prosecutors say were fabricated with forged sign-in sheets and falsified eligibility forms.
Lakiya Malone
Photo Courtesy United States Department of Justice
Those bribes allegedly came from Alexander Soofer, the executive director of the nonprofit Abundant Blessings, who was arrested separately and has agreed to plead guilty. The two cases are linked.
Alexander Soofer
Photo Courtesy United States Department of Justice
A third defendant charged Wednesday, Donye Mitchell, 55, of Orange, chief executive of the nonprofit The Big Blue Umbrella, is charged with wire fraud over more than $1.2 million in grant money from a county-funded nonprofit. He is considered a fugitive.
Donye “Danya” Mitchell
Photo Courtesy United States Department of Justice
Two audits, two warnings
Los Angeles officials had been told this system was leaking.
A Los Angeles County Auditor-Controller review released in November 2024 found LAHSA had awarded $50.8 million in cash advances to service providers beginning in fiscal 2017-18 without establishing agreements setting out how or when the money would come back. It found the agency could not provide adequate supporting documentation for about $5 million in advances to five providers, and that it understated what it had awarded two providers by $505,591.
Auditors also found LAHSA could not produce an accurate list of its own contracts, and that about half of its planned contract reviews included no method for checking whether a provider actually delivered the services it was paid for.
Simply put: LAHSA could not always show where public money went, whether contractors followed their agreements, or whether homeless residents received the services taxpayers funded.
Four months later, in March 2025, a court-ordered audit by the firm Alvarez & Marsal reached a similar conclusion. That review found fragmented data systems across LAHSA, the city and the county, and inconsistent reporting that made expenditures hard to verify. Auditors could not determine the total the city had spent to create shelter beds.
That audit grew out of a 2020 federal lawsuit by the LA Alliance for Human Rights, the case the Westside Current has followed as it forced open the books on the billions Los Angeles spends moving people off sidewalks and into treatment and housing.
Neither audit publicly named Home At Last. But together they put LAHSA — and the city and county governments that oversee it — on notice.
LAHSA’s answer
The agency does not accept the premise that this money was lost.
In its formal response to the county audit, LAHSA disagreed with the recommendation that it establish repayment terms for the outstanding advances. Then-CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum told the federal judgeoverseeing the case that the advances were startup money for Measure H, the county homelessness sales tax, and were always meant to be recouped when that tax ended — and that the county had never asked LAHSA to collect them sooner.
LAHSA has also recovered more since. The November 2024 audit put recovery at about $2.5 million. By early 2025 the agency reported recouping about $13 million of the $50.8 million.
Separately, LAHSA said it cooperated with federal investigators and the U.S. Attorney’s Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force, said it has zero tolerance for fraud, and said no agency personnel were implicated in Wednesday’s cases.
The money kept moving anyway
Despite both audits, LAHSA advanced Home At Last another $2,790,732 during the 2025-26 fiscal year.
By May 15, 2026, the nonprofit still held $602,507 in outstanding advances, according to LAHSA. More than $533,000 of that was tied to two shelters.
Six days later, on May 21, Home At Last notified LAHSA it would stop operating both locations within four weeks. The decision put housing at risk for 181 people — roughly $2,900 in unreturned advance money for every person whose bed was on the line.
The nonprofit blamed delayed reimbursements. LAHSA rejected that, saying Home At Last had already been advanced enough to keep both shelters open while its paperwork was processed.
The agency moved residents elsewhere, terminated the contracts in June and barred Home At Last from LAHSA funding for five years.
By then federal investigators were already following the money. LAHSA has acknowledged receiving an IRS letter in May 2026 saying agents had seized cash from an address linked to Young, and that the agency might be able to claim some of it. LAHSA then froze further payments and demanded records.
What remains unanswered is whether LAHSA, the city or the county caught this on their own — or whether the first real warning came from the IRS.
“It is long overdue that people are going to jail for the fraud, waste, and abuse of homeless people living and dying on the streets of Los Angeles,” said Paul Webster, executive director of the LA Alliance for Human Rights, who testified before Congress this week on Los Angeles homelessness spending.
The agency taking the blame is already being taken apart
The $2.8 million went out during LAHSA’s final funded year.
On April 1, 2025, the county Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 to pull all county funding from LAHSA and stand up its own agency. The new Department of Homeless Services and Housing launched Jan. 1, 2026with an $843 million budget, funded largely by Measure A — the half-cent sales tax voters approved in 2024, which repealed and replaced Measure H and took effect in April 2025.
In June, HUD suspended federal funding to LAHSA, saying it had found evidence the agency lacked financial management and internal controls for the $944 million it had received since 2021. LAHSA is laying off 284 workers. And this week, as the Current reported, the LAHSA Commission voted not to seek renewal of the administrative roles it has held for decades.
The handover is already done. Effective July 1, 2026 — six weeks after Home At Last walked away from its two shelters — the county’s new department took over direct administration of more than 230 work orders with county service providers, covering more than 6,500 interim housing beds and case management for more than 30,000 people in permanent supportive housing.
Whether the advance practice traveled with the contracts is the open question. The Board saw it coming: in February, supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger won unanimous approval of a motion to tighten contract oversight at the new department, a motion that cited LAHSA’s repeated audit findings and the risk of lost or misused funds as the reason it was needed.
A motion is not a control. What sits between a cash advance and a shelter bed today — who signs off, and who checks the work before the money moves — is the thing worth watching now.
The other cases
Wednesday’s arrests are part of a run of federal homelessness-fraud cases over the past year. They involve different agencies and different funding streams, and should not be read as one scheme:
Cody Holmes
Photo Courtesy United States Department of Justice
Alexander Soofer, 42, of Westwood, executive director of Abundant Blessings — arrested on a wire fraud complaint. The Justice Department says he fraudulently obtained $23 millionin public homelessness money and pocketed at least $10 million, including a $7 million home. He has agreed to plead guilty. This is the case Malone’s alleged bribes connect to.Cody Holmes, 31, of Beverly Hills, former chief financial officer of Shangri-La Industries — charged in October 2025 with mail fraud. Prosecutors say he submitted fake bank records to obtain $25.9 million from the state’s Homekey program for a Thousand Oaks project, and diverted more than $2.2 million to personal American Express accounts. Homekey is a state program, not LAHSA money.Steven Taylor, 44, of Brentwood, developer — charged in October 2025 with seven counts of bank fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Prosecutors say he bought a Cheviot Hills property for $11.2 million and resold it to the nonprofit Weingart Center Association for $27.3 million — about 2.4 times what he paid — through a double-escrow deal, in which a property is bought and resold in back-to-back closings so the middleman’s profit never appears on either set of papers. The Westside Current reported that sale in 2024, a year before charges were filed, disclosing that Weingart paid more than double what the seller had paid 12 days earlier.
Steven Taylor
Photo Courtesy United States Department of Justice
Aside from Soofer, none of these defendants has been convicted.
“The Department of Homeless Services and Housing (HSH) condemns any fraud or misuse of public funds intended to address homelessness. HSH was created, in part, to strengthen accountability in our homeless services system,” Los Angeles County Department of Homeless Services and Housing said. “Concerns about the management of Home at Last had already prompted HSH to review its work orders and agreements with the organization. The review is ongoing, and findings from those reviews will inform the County’s next steps.”
“These resources are entrusted to our system to provide critical housing and services to some of our most vulnerable residents, and any misuse of those funds is a serious breach of public trust. We expect taxpayer dollars to be properly managed and services to be delivered effectively. When that’s not happening, HSH takes appropriate corrective action, which may include recovering funds or transferring services to a robust network of qualified providers. While HSH cannot comment on the substance of the ongoing federal investigation, we support strong oversight and accountability across the homeless services system.”
A note on the numbers. Figures in this case vary by source. The Justice Department’s complaint against Young cites more than $7.5 million diverted from more than $118 million received. The Associated Press framed Wednesday’s three cases as roughly $12 million combined. Some accounts have put Young’s total at nearly $120 million and the diverted amount as high as $18 million. There is no single agreed figure, and the Current has used the complaint’s numbers where they conflict.
How to check this yourself
See what the county spends and where: The Department of Homeless Services and Housing now administers county homeless services contracts directly — homeless.lacounty.govRead both audits: the November 2024 county review is posted by the Auditor-Controller; the March 2025 court-ordered audit is filed in LA Alliance for Human Rights v. City of Los Angeles, case 2:20-cv-02291, Central District of CaliforniaReport suspected fraud by a county contractor or vendor:Los Angeles County Fraud Hotline, 1-800-544-6861, or file online at fraud.lacounty.gov. Reports can be made anonymously, and county code protects whistleblowers from retaliation.Report fraud involving city funds: Los Angeles City Controller’s Fraud, Waste and Abuse Hotline, 866-428-1514, or controller.lacity.org/fwa. LAHSA was a joint city-county agency, so either office may apply.Tips on this federal investigation: FBI Los Angeles, 1-800-CALL-FBI, or tips.fbi.govWhat you pay: Measure A adds a half-cent per dollar on taxable purchases countywide — about 25 cents on a $100 purchase, or roughly $5 a month for an average household
Editor’s note: The Westside Current contacted the Los Angeles City Administrative Officer to ask when city officials first learned of concerns about Home At Last, what they did about it, and whether Mayor Karen Bass or the City Council was notified. The office did not immediately respond. The Current also contacted Los Angeles County and counsel for Young; this story will be updated.