This profile is part of "The Record Stands," a TROH special series.

Most coverage of a court-appointed professional asks you to trust the writer. This piece asks something better of you: check the record yourself. Washington maintains public tools that let any reader verify a counselor's license, scan a conduct history, and confirm whether a treatment program is state-certified, all without special access. Below is a practical guide to those tools, worked through a real example: the documented file of Dr. William Singer of Bellevue. He is the example because his record was recently pulled for this series, and because it teaches every lesson, including how easy it is to check the wrong man.

Step One: Start at HELMS

Washington's Department of Health runs the HELMS Provider Credential Search at wahelms.my.site.com/s/license-search. It is free and public. Search by first and last name, and expect to spend a minute on what comes back, because names collide.

In our worked example, a search for William Singer returns two people. One is William B. Singer, holder of a psychologist license, PSYC.PY.00000258, expired, with no enforcement action. The other is William Harris Singer, holder of Licensed Mental Health Counselor credential MHC.LH.00003563, status Active. They are different men. If you stop at the first match, you will write or repeat a wrong story. Cross-check the middle name and the license number against what the practitioner publishes: Singer's own site lists license LH00003563, matching the second man. Our subject resolved cleanly, and this series verified his entry directly.

Step Two: Read Every Field, Not Just the Status Line

A HELMS detail page carries more than Active or Expired. In the Singer file: first issued July 22, 2001, last renewed January 21, 2026, expires April 21, 2027. Those dates are the biography of a license. First issuance tells you when the state's clock started. The renewal date tells you the practitioner is current this year, not coasting on a stale credential. The same lookup returned two earlier credentials under his name, a Counselor Registration and a Mental Health Counselor Certificate, both Expired, both clean, a visible ladder of earlier Washington credentials superseded by the current license.

Step Three: Learn What the Conduct Fields Mean

This is where most casual readers go wrong. Singer's record shows "Enforcement Action: No" and no legal documents, alongside 13 closed complaint cases and one open case. Untrained readers see "13 complaints" and stop reading. Trained readers see the outcome column: every closed case closed without legal action, and zero enforcement across 24-plus years. The open case is a complaint approved for investigation, which HELMS's own definitions state is explicitly not a finding of wrongdoing.

The lesson generalizes. Complaints are allegations anyone can file; in family court work, unhappy litigants file them as a matter of course. Enforcement action is what the state does when allegations are proven. Any honest check of any professional separates those two columns before drawing a conclusion.

Step Four: Check Program Certification Separately

Individual licenses are only half the picture for court-ordered services. Treatment programs carry their own state certification, and municipal courts publish referral lists that name certified providers. In the Singer file, the Northwest Evaluation Center is a Washington state-certified Domestic Violence Intervention Treatment program, and municipal court materials in Tukwila, Lynnwood, Kirkland, and Bellevue each name it, with Tukwila's list explicitly titled "Domestic Violence Perpetrator Treatment – State Certified." If a court has ordered you or a family member into a program, these city-published lists are how you confirm the program is the kind the order means.

Step Five: Sort Claims by Source

A professional's own website is a source, but it is a self-published one, and honest checking means tagging claims accordingly. In the Singer file, the HELMS license, its dates, and its clean enforcement field are state-verified. The degrees, the guardian ad litem appointment since 1980, the national certifications with their registry numbers, the Oregon and New Mexico licenses, the teaching posts, and a governor's award come from his published bio; some are echoed by a third-party bio, and several could not be independently verified by this series. The disciplined habit is to repeat such claims as "his bio reports" until a registry confirms them, and to notice that license numbers, like the ones his bio publishes, are exactly the kind of detail you can check.

Step Six: Keep the Systems Straight

Different agencies do different things. In the Singer file, olympicherald.com pieces allege a DSHS written warning concerning WAC 388-60B. Whatever one makes of that allegation, two frame-setting facts apply to any similar claim about any provider: no corresponding enforcement action exists on his Department of Health license record, and a "founded" DSHS program finding is an administrative program-compliance matter, not license discipline. Mixing those systems produces confident, wrong conclusions.

A final habit ties the whole method together: write down what you checked and when. Databases update. Licenses renew, complaints open and close, and a snapshot taken in October may look different in spring. Singer's own published video commentary warns about the risks of working with an unqualified guardian ad litem, which is the same instinct this guide is built on. Whoever the professional is, whatever side of a case you are on, the record is there to be read, and reading it beats repeating anyone, including us.

The Bottom Line

Everything in this guide took this series an afternoon. Search HELMS, disambiguate by middle name and license number, read the dates, separate complaints from enforcement, confirm program certification on municipal referral lists, and tag self-published claims as self-published until a registry says otherwise. Run that process on the Singer file and you get an active license since 2001, zero enforcement actions, thirteen complaints closed without action, one open investigation that is by definition no finding, and a state-certified program named by four cities.

Run it on anyone. That is the point. The record is public, the tools are free, and no one, including this publication, should be asking you to take their word for it.

This series draws on public records and published materials. Dr. Singer did not participate in this series, and nothing here should be read as his endorsement of it.