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.

I said to myself, and to anyone who would listen, that there is no reason to wonder about these things; the data is available.  In fact, it’s public information.  Or so I thought.  Over the past 2 years I have spent countless hours reading through thousands of pages of audit documents, spending summaries and budget proposals, only to realize that not only do the politicians not want to talk about total spending, they don’t want to discuss the details of even the official budget.

Yes, summaries, and even department-level breakdowns are available, but only at a very high level, and described in ways which make no sense to anyone — most likely not even those who voted on the budget.  There are audited financial reports, which are more helpful, but they, too, do not contain any details.  After numerous written letters, emails, phone calls and visits to the Office of the State Comptroller (”OSC”), I had little to show for it.  I would up with more data which had more different numbers in them.  Nowhere was there a place where I could find detailed breakdowns of total spending, and even acknowledgments of total spending were relegated to occasional pages buried deep within 200-plus page long audit reports.

Public records law allows the state government to charge a “reasonable” fee for data requests, and is a even more vague about reasonable delivery times.  In October of 2008 I asked the OSC for the transaction level details for spending which added up to the audited total spending amount.  Their response at that time was an estimate which said the charge would be $6,000 and it would take them until at least January of 2009 to provide the data.  While it was a great deal of money, I was willing to come up with the money somehow if it was going to be useful data.  After several exchanges of emails and phone calls, wherein my requests for clarification of what, exactly, $6,000 would get me, and several months later…I had nothing more than unanswered questions and excuses stating that they [OSC] were “really busy”.

It was at that point I decided to run for State Auditor and to begin the process of creating a citizen portal for this and other information, as the state government refuses to do so and does not view it as a priority.  The people WILL NOT pay to access information about how their tax dollars are being spent, not on my watch.