hi i'm state representative dave rogers and this is the rogers report today i'm honored to be joined by massachusetts auditor suzanne bomb first hour however i want to give you a brief update on the work of the legislature there are a number of issues before the house and senate and perhaps foremost among them is how we're going to supply much needed energy to the commonwealth our last coal plants have closed and the nuclear power plant will be shut down in june of two thousand and nineteen meaning our capacity has eroded while demand continues to increase in the light of the need to increase production and take strong action to address climate change a number of proposals have been put forward i expect this session to feature a major bill touching on a number of types of energy i strongly support meeting these challenges with renewable energy such as solar wind and hydropower criminal justice reform is a top priority of mine and the legislature has taken note of the many steps we can take to improve public safety and curtail the heavy human and monetary cost of incarceration the house and senate may want to wait for the results of a pew charitable trust study of how our criminal justice system functions but i will continue to push for reforms now public records reform is also likely to be taken up the session perhaps this week negotiations are ongoing to find a balanced approach to make public records more available to the public without unnecessarily burdening governmental entities that have to respond to these requests equal access for transgender people in massachusetts is also pending action as the law is currently written crude and archaic forms of discrimination like the denial of services at a grocery store or refusal of entry to a boss are still legally permissible equal access is a civil right should not have to be on the table for debate and the time for action is long since passed a charter school bill may be taken up by the house and senate in light of the impending twenty sixteen ballot question to lift the cap in massachusetts the charter cap i am very wary of this approach is i strongly support increased investment in our traditional public education system as the centerpiece of our education strategy and i have significant concerns about the expansion of a two tiered system finally the legislature will take additional action to address the ongoing opioid crisis and may take further steps to bolster the m b t a both of these serious challenges are ongoing for the people of massachusetts and the people of my district and will require legislative responses now without further ado i'm honored to introduce auditor suzanne bump welcome suzanne i'm delighted to be here representative thanks for coming on the show and i guess first things first perhaps you can explain in a general way what the state auditor's office does so well the position is included written right into the state constitution i'm one of six created today it might not be called state auditor it might be called something like chief accountability officer for the commonwealth because that's what the auditors office does in massachusetts we are not just a bunch of accountants not that there's anything wrong with being an accountant but we don't do financial auditing in state auditors office we do what's called performance auditing so we care how we're doing an audit how much money has been spent but we also care it was spent and what the taxpayers got for it and whether we can spend it more efficiently and more effectively and so that's the goal of the auditors office is to make sure that money is well spent that revenues and expenditures are accounted for that they aren't subject to fraud waste and abuse and we tried to walk in true that all programs are just run with integrity that's great thanks for that that's a great description and i think  know the public sometimes has a very general sense of what people do my job and i think it's helpful to a lumen the what it is exactly you're charged with doing right and you're in your second term now a state auditor i am and and also had a career in public service before that as well maybe you can give us a little bit of your of your history in public service and well in the i think i used to be a state rep i did when that in the distant past in the distant past so from one nine hundred eighty five to one thousand nine hundred three i was a member of the house of representatives some of your constituents might remember that i was there around the time that mary jane gibson was your state representative so i did that for eight years i'm also an attorney like yourself i believe that's  worked in the private sector for a number of years but i came back into government with governor deval patrick and i was the secretary of labor in workforce development so i had six agencies under me fifteen hundred employees big job and it was it was a big job and i loved it i loved it but i saw our in the auditor's office the opportunity to do something that i really have become more and more passionate about over the years and that is just trying to make government work better beginning out how agencies have gone off track and how to get them back on track for me it's all about the public trust i want to show that government is capable of self examination and self correction great and since becoming state much structured the same way although i called the auditors office and all we've done right now is allude to our auditing work we also have a couple of other functions there's the bureau of special investigations and we are responsible will not go for investigating welfare of mass health food stamp day care program fraud so those a fraud investigators we have a division of local mandates which is a point at which we have contact both with the legislature and with municipalities so if the legislature tells the communities where you have to change the way you're doing things we want you to add this new program take on this responsibility it's up to my office to decide whether whether you will have to pay for that in the legislature or whether local property tax payers will have to pay for that so that's the same structure is there but what's new in the office i think in addition to may if it's just her professionalized to get in folks with broader ranges of experience so that we can look more deeply into agency operations is the use of data analytics tools so that then we can do that work and i just recently was out in new mexico where i was asked to come out with some of my i t people and present to other auditors how it is that we have been it to to go from not making much use of big data as it's called in to being one of the leaders in the nation in auditors offices with this capacity all that's great so you were interacting with the audi r in new mexico or right and and actually at this particular forum there were auditors from the federal government because lots of agencies with the well all across the federal government there are internal auditors as well as  stated countability and the office of inspector general they all have they all have an o i g within them too and then there are just auditors for for programs within the federal government business and as well as the state of the state government and then there gather data and information as you say a performance audit to an accountability audit to see how a particular program is working or particular agency is working how do you follow up to try to  implement changes or recommendations and how does that work once you once you have the results of the audit where does it go from there well we take we take a number of months in order to conduct the audit and it requires getting pretty well grounded obviously in the legal requirements for the agency what is it supposed to do how is it supposed to do it and we will look at operations and find out whether they're complying with all of those rules and then as i say looking at effectiveness and efficiency and we don't have the power to force an agency to act on our recommendations what we do do though is go back and ask them after six months has passed since an audit was issued so how are you doing with those recommendations rights that were made sure and yet we care about that not just because we care about them making themselves better but it's also a tool that we use to make ourselves better because we want to know if our recommendations have have been impossible to implement what the impediments be to them but by and large what we hear back from them is that ninety five percent of our recommendations are either have have already been implemented six months out or are in the process of being implemented and we'll find out where that they are whether that's truthful or not when we go back in three years than that because that's pretty much the cycle for an agency audit will visit them every three years or so i start to see how they're to see how they're doing that's great and i know there are a few things that are sort of hot right now if you will that are current in maybe we could talk about those i think it's really and important work one is there have been as the public knows as those of us who serve in government know some significant problems with d c s department of children and family and  i know you've done some work looking at t c f maybe you can let us know a little bit about about your work in that area sure well you'll recall that it was three nearly two years ago now so when oliver went missing a little boy who was family was under the supervision of d c and the agency simply had lost track of him nobody from his family reported that he had disappeared the mother didn't didn't report it and ultimately he was found deceased by the by the side of the road the governor at that time governor patrick called for the child welfare league of america to come in and assess the agency and find out how something like this could could happen while at the same time that tragedy was playing out we were actually conducting an audit not of the family services programs at d c s but of the foster care program at the c f in our audit came up at about the same time that the child welfare leak of america released its report and we had a lot of common findings simply that there were too many too few staff who were not adequately trained that weren't adequately supervised that were using reliant upon technology to try to keep track that of the children and the families they just they just were under they were under resourced and they didn't have good they didn't have good leadership all of those things are to me essential elements of accountability accountability isn't when you stand up and you say to the folks i'm really sorry that this agency has failed in its mission accountability means you plan to prevent things like this from ever happening and you stay on top of it and so in the aftermath of that d c you did make some internal changes the legislature increased funding for the agency but it is a complex agency with lots of problems and so even though more than a year has gone by we've still had a summer and fall with more headlines about things that are going wrong within the agency that they still haven't fixed and another child hit the i rather a tragedy exactly actually lots of other ancillary things that the agency should be doing helping parents become better parents and all but the main mission is keeping the children safe and i think that really needed to be said and he's got a great secretary of health and human services now who started out her professional career as a social worker so i think she knows better than anybody who's been there in the recent past how to fix that agency but even as i applaud them for the steps they're taking i'm really concerned that that it's not just a matter of d c fixing itself it's other agencies in state government have to come to the aid of these troubled families as well sure you know so many of them are star suffering  from from poverty lack of education substance abuse mental illness and all of those each and sees have to be much more willing to bring their resources to bear to help this agency it can't do it on its own because these are very troubled families absolutely and i know the benchmark i've always heard is that the caseworker should be a fifteen to one ratio each caseworker should have no more than fifteen cases and  i've seen different data you know you see different studies and statistical renderings but i applaud the governor for stepping forward but i you may have a family but you can't you don't work with a family you have to work with each of the individual in that family right which makes for very difficult dynamics and it's because of budget cuts and the loss of social workers aides who were the ones responsible for pulling all the education records the medical records together seeing that kids were transported from to medical visits and the like when you lose that support and you're having as a social worker to spend your time on those kinds of administrative duties it makes it makes it harder for you to carry those caseload but i will say case loads and funding for social workers has been at issue going back to the days when i was in the legislature i remember in i think one nine hundred eighty six was the first time we saw social workers picketing the state house saying you've got to take down the caseload you've got to give the agency more money right and you know it and the the caseload has has fluctuated but it's got to come down in order to really help these families you know well we'll just have to keep working hard on the children families and persons with disabilities or maybe we're doing oversight work i know you're doing a lot of good work and you know i hate to use a cliche but when it comes to the safety of children you know failure is not an option so all of us in state government need to keep pushing another area i know you've done some interesting work is in the area of tax expenditures and maybe we can talk about that a little bit the way i describe for the public or for people as i learned about it myself tax expenditures is government really spend your money in two ways one is direct spending taking in tax revenue and spending it but another way a real way the government spends your money is by by deciding on tax breaks money that would otherwise come in but the government says no we're going to give special accelerated depreciation on capital equipment or the the famous one now is the film tax credit to bring movie making the massachusetts these are spending spending of taxpayer resources because you're forgoing the revenue and there's been a lot of debate and discussion in state government about are these tax expenditures going to cliche you're getting the bang for the buck you do it to generate jobs to generate economic activity are we getting the bang for the buck on tax expenditures so  without his background can you talk a little bit about what your what your agency is doing on tax expenditures and i've been happy to you know i share your interest in asking those questions is this an effective tax policy are we getting the result that we had hoped for by this tax credit or tax deduction or were tax exemption so in my earliest days in the auditor's office starting in two thousand and eleven i tried to do  analysis of this and what we determined was that for over two billion dollars worth of business tax breaks there is no measure of success there not at the there aren't reports being written about the kinds of companies that are benefiting from this and whether we're hitting our goal whatever the goal was the public policy goal was they said they were reporting mechanisms there's not actual oversight beyond the department of revenue checking your tax returns right there aren't claw back provisions so that's a big fat claw back you know look if you promise to create three hundred jobs and we're going to be a tax break great there's a lot of bull goal and maybe the tax code is the way to help do it right but if you don't deliver consistently i don't think you can hold people to a one year time frame and it has to be structured in a rational way be balanced and fair about it if if over time the evidence is you're not generating the jobs and claw back the revenue exactly you know exactly it's an element of accountability and so we did this report over two billion dollars no measures of success so i said ok so let's go in and let's ask the department of revenue how how they do it how do they decide what they're going even audit so are they looking at any of these breaks in particular and they said oh we can't talk to you about that nor can we share any information from the tax returns themselves because under the law the auditor's office doesn't have the ability to look at that well in thirty seven other states the auditor does have that  am working for that authority from the from the legislature i have filed now for the second time legislation that would allow me to look at tax business tax records not to not to audit individual companies i'll leave that to the partner and revenue but i want to make sure that the department of revenue is doing its job and then i want to collect the data in the aggregate mentioned to you all this data analytics capabilities that we have now i want to be able to pull the information off and find out get the profile of the companies that are getting the breaks figure out of those of the companies that were intended to benefit from the brakes and just look at the dynamics of it and see  and put that in front of the public and the legislature because i think that if you have better information you'll be able to make better decisions about what is a failure and effective tax code so i'm hoping that that this year the bill has attracted some more support from members of the legislature and from different groups that advocate for this kind of accountability government i'm hoping that the that we'll be able to overcome some of the opposition from the business community as i said most other states two thirds of the states in the country give their auditors this ability most of the other states don't have that ability because they don't even file they don't have business tax taxes to begin with right so so it's that's the reason they don't they don't give the authority to the auditor but i think it's a it's a good step towards towards a accountability effective tax code absolutely would seem sensible to me and it's all it's a lot of money and particularly when we know a lot of state agencies are under pressure under budgetary pressure that if you're giving away tax breaks they ought to be working to do to create jobs create canonic activity so i think it's i commend your work in that area thanks and another i think area where you've been active is obviously we went through a rugged winner  a buckle there were a lot of problems my district my constituents depend on the t the redline the passes the commuter rail and so we've had a debate in this session about how to reform the m b t a governor had a task force that basically said you need managerial reforms and revenue i commend the governor for acknowledging we need new revenue so far the governor in the action the legislature has taken has been more on the managerial reform side i haven't really seen the revenue and so we'll have to see how that evolves but one of the pieces of this was the so called put chico law on privatizing some of the state contracts and i know you've done some work in that area maybe you can talk about that a little bit sure up more than twenty years ago the legislature enacted a law that said if this if any agency of state government is going to put out to a private actually going to save us money that service the quality of the service that the agency is providing won't degrade well the governor included in his reform bill that you were just talking about a provision that would bypass this this analysis that is required and would allow the at the end bta for a period of three years to taxpayer protection because if you're going to take an element of state government you know really i love the hands of state employees and give multi millions of dollars to a contractor  serve the public you should at the very least do a cost benefit analysis that is reviewed by an independent entity the auditor for instance and i'm very i'm very concerned because the track record the reason that the legislature passed this in the first place in one nine hundred ninety one was that there was a lot of privatization that was taking place without the benefit of this kind of analysis and we're seeing we were seeing actually that costs were going up because now you had new executives in newly formed companies that were taking over this work they were being paid much more than the state employees were who were doing this work originally and that's what the legislature put the brakes on this and said cost benefit analysis accountability to the taxpayers comes comes first so the the the legislature though did see fit to give the governor this authority to to put things out to bid for a period of three years so we'll see we'll see what what comes of it so far they haven't been able to put out any any new ideas maybe maybe they will but but i hope by hope that the taxpayers truly will benefit from this because taxpayers are still on the hook that's right on track to the contractors doing the work now but we're still paying for it so it's we've got to make sure that they get it right sure well we're down to our last couple minutes and so i thought i'd just give you an opportunity to talk about in the if there's any future initiatives or sort of things in the pipeline that you're thinking about or we're frankly to just talk about any of the work of your office pick up on something that you mentioned at the outset and that is the lifting of the charter school cap from your own position on that are one of the audits that we did a couple of years ago actually in two thousand and fourteen looked at the department of education's oversight of charter schools charter schools don't get just carte blanche to go off and on and providing education as they see fit they do have to meet certain financial tests but then they also have to have to meet standards in other ways that are created by the by the department of education and what one of some sort of we have found there were a lot of deficiencies in oversight there weren't uniform standards for when schools were getting their charter authorized we saw that there the agency wasn't really keeping good track of how many kids actually were waiting to get into schools we saw that there was a lot of duplicate counting and so that the size of the list was really overstated which you've got to take into consideration when you're deciding how many charter schools there i should be to meet needs and i think even greater concern to us again getting back to data was that we found th data about whether it's the demographics of charter schools matched up with the public schools was accurate so i caution caution you what you go forward you don't have to look a little skeptical at some of the information that's out there great thanks well state auditor suzanne bomb thank you so much for coming on the show it was great and keep up the good work will do thank you