When you consider the facts, there is only one clear choice for the next Massachusetts State Auditor: Kamal Jain.

“There’s a world of difference between financial auditing and government auditing.” ~Alan Levine, Retired Partner, Ernst & Young

How many auditors does it take to audit our state government?  Well, the answer depends on which kind of auditor you’re talking about.  Here, Kamal Jain explains that there are many different kinds of auditors, and that it would be incorrect to confuse a financial auditor with a government auditor.

The State Auditor is the only statewide, constitutional officer elected by the PEOPLE of the Commonwealth who has the authority to audit the state GOVERNMENT on behalf of the people.  No other elected or appointed official has the authority or mandate to provide the voters and taxpayers with a report card on governmental operations, policy-making and spending decisions.  The government must be at least as accountable to the people as it requires the people to be to the government.

Beyond assessing the annual operations of state and municipal government, the Auditor also has an obligation to weigh-in on day-to-day decisions about to be made by the government with regard to privatization, and outsourcing of services.  In addition, the Auditor should make clear to the people what total spending per program and beneficiary is, including analysis of overhead costs, and comparing those costs to similar functions as they are handled by the private sector.

With billions of taxpayer dollars being spent in millions of transactions every year,someone has to give the people the information and tools they need to understand what goes on.  That someone should be the State Auditor.

It would be fair to say that no one person today truly understands all government operations and spending, nor could they identify most waste on their own.  It would be impossible for any one person to know that, or even for a room full of accountants.  Transparency will provide the information and tools which will empower the people — all of the people — to become investigators of waste, fraud and corruption.  Areas of spending that are typically overlooked by most people will come to someone’s attention because millions of taxpayers will have access to ALL the information.

Transparency is a prerequisite for good government.  Transparency makes accountability and efficiency possible.  We already have everything we need to have TOTAL government transparency today, except for a State Auditor willing to not just make it a priority, but to make it THE priority.  For TOTAL transparency and accountability, there is only ONE choice for Massachusetts State Auditor: Kamal Jain.

How often do we hear the politicians complaining about “difficult budget cuts” and having to “slash the budget”?  Every day it seems.  What they do not tell you is that the amount they are cutting — if they are cutting at all — is from a larger PROPOSED budget that they want to have, and that most of the time even after “slashing”, the actual budget for a new fiscal year is actually higher than the year before.  But it’s much worse than that.

You see, “the budget” is the only part of total spending the politicians will publicly acknowledge or discuss, and they have a good reason: It only represents just over HALF OF TOTAL SPENDING.  This is easy enough to prove once you know where to look, and we will get to that in a moment.  But first consider what it means to have a portion of total spending be called “the budget”, and the balance of spending to be hidden from view.  It means the politicians can shift spending from “the budget” to things that are considered off budget, and magically “the budget” looks smaller.

The truth can only be found in total spending.  Accurate total spending can only come from audited reports, such as the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (”CAFR”), which is published in December of each year, approximately 5-6 months after the close of the prior fiscal year.  These reports comply with Generally Accepted Accounting Practices, or are said to be “GAAP compliant”.  The CAFR is typically more than 200 pages in length, and of those 200 pages, only two or three pages may contain the figure for total spending for a given fiscal year.

If you do not want to wait until 6 months after a fiscal year is over to determine approximately how much total spending will be, you have to do some digging because the state’s Mass.gov web site does not make it easy, and the location of information pertaining to spending changes during the budgeting process.  Significant changes to the economy notwithstanding, it is possible to get a sense of how much total spending will be.  You have to find the “resource summary” section of the budget site — this has been located at http://www.mass.gov/bb in recent years.  Once you locate the resource summary (if you are able — they keep moving it), you have to add together the columns which represent the “total budget” (or similar name), and one or more other columns labeled something like “other non-budgetary revenue” or “non-tax revenue”.  This method allows you to get very close to the estimated level of total spending for the fiscal year.

Using recent years as an example, the audited (CAFR) state government total spending for 2008 was approximately $50,000,000,000 – in a year when “the budget” was approximately $28,000,000,000.  The CAFR data for 2009 was not available at the time of this writing, but estimates would place total spending at approximately $52,400,000,000 in a year when “the budget” was again approximately $28,000,000,000.  Fiscal year 2010, which is going to be heavily influenced by the severe economic downturn affecting Massachusetts and the rest of the nation, shows a projected level of total spending of $53,900,000,000 with a total “budget” of approximately $27,000,000,000.

Through the magic of political sleight-of-hand, “the budget” has been seemingly reduced by nearly $1 billion, while total spending has gone up by over $1 billion.  Think of a word problem from grade school mathematics: Has spending been cut?  If so, by how much?  [Hint: If the politicians get this one wrong, they are either lying or really bad at math.]

Central to transparency will be a citizen portal to government spending.  Because transparency is so important, we are not waiting to begin to make government financial accessible to the people.  Funds are being raised to purchase “public” information from the state government, and to engage attorneys to assist in acquiring the data as necessary.  Read the story of Kamal Jain’s attempts to get this information to date.

The citizen portal will be operated as a separate site at MassTransparency.com, and we will work closely with individuals and organizations who are also working on various facets of transparency to make it a key resource for anyone living in Massachusetts.