hello and welcome to channel seven teams town meeting television and another candidate forum for the general election i met kelly your host for tonight's interview and conversation with the candidates for auditor of accounts we have democrat doug hoffer joining us as well as liberty union candidate marina brown richard canyon republican was unable to join us this evening he is running his name will be on the ballot time for opening statements in the arena will begin with you please hi i'm marina brown i'm running for for auditor my focus in running for the office of auditor is transparency the job of the auditor as doug will probably explain i nvolves very auditing various aspects of the state my interest is in transparency i believe the state has a long way to be to go in order to be properly transparent we've made a lot of strides in the last two years but there's still over two hundred fifty exemptions in the public records law the office of the auditor is not normally used to in the service of transparency however i would like to add a additional audit that would audit the transparency of the state and i would use the office of the auditor to expose data to the public there's a lot of things that are exempt from public records types of software is exempt from the public's view database structures these should not be exempt like this the public should know what type of software is being used because their privacy is at risk if software is compromised and database structure likewise should not be kept private because the public needs to know what is being  kept about them and from them and i also want to promote the use of open source software with this in the state open source software makes the entire world the auditor of the software and software like accounts need to be audited for safety and that's what i would like to do if should i be chosen as the auditor or a good marine a brown thank you so much for your opening statement please thank you first a correction i'm running as a democrat and a progressive that's all right on the job six years i'm still enjoying it i have a great staff the work we do i think chiefs three important goals one it provides important information to managers to help them do a better job second it provides information to policymakers so they can make better informed decisions and finally it provides information to the general public which as arena noted doesn't always have easy access to information about how state government works and i might add with regard to all those exemptions to the public records act i'm responsible for one of them after i came in i was contacted by a number of state employees who said they would be more inclined to provide information about what's happening in their departments if they weren't fearful of retaliation and at that time if anybody contacted my office and said give me the names of all the people who whistleblowers who contacted you i would have had to give it to them so i got the legislature to agree to let me protect the names of those who prefer to be anonymous for that than the other one i threw in there sorry ok so we're moving right on we have a complete list of questions and candidates have been provided these questions ahead of time a reminder if you do have a question for dr marino you're invited to dollars up at eight six to three nine six six and i welcome to all our viewers enjoying our online stream at c h seventeen dot tv doug we'll go right on to you if we may i'm looking for a report card how is the state doing in terms of it's job meeting the needs of its citizens in your viewpoint that's the big question first as the financial side then there's the provision of services and our office is trying to answer both of those on the financial side for what it's worth in this might surprise some people we're doing reasonably well we do have a balanced budget every year that's a matter of cooperation between the administration legislature the kaffir the so called kaffir the audit of the states financial statements is clean we are a aaa rated state generally we do ok there are people who disagree with how the money is spent or how much is collected but on balance we do alright as for performance that's where we come in and i come from a policy background and i was hoping in the office we could do more programatic performance arts which is basically what we do and i should tell people if they don't know we don't do the perform the compliance audit that the federal government requires is called the a one thirty three or the financial are we farm those out to an audit firm that leaves us free to do performance ordering which is a lot more fun and the only reason i would consider keeping or getting the job in the first place so the performance audits are both of the nuts and bolts of state government and ideally of programs you know your program director and the legislature created a program and said here's some money here are objectives and goals my job then is to say have you achieved those objectives and goals as stated by the legislature that's often very difficult because the date is hard to get program's well i don't know i have not had time to look at financial data like doug has but what i look at more of the problems i see the problems i see are overpriced software that should have been perhaps done with open source software that would have been less expensive i see a great deal of trouble in the prison systems if i were elected auditor i would be grinding the prison system down and as far as exemptions for four employees i don't believe that people who who deal with approach public in a position of power should have exemptions on their employment data this means prison guards this means if i'm elected i don't believe my information be should be kept private maybe where i live the stuff where i could be targeted i don't believe police officers job stuff should be remain private they are servants of the public these are problems i see see i people in power able to hide in behind these exemptions i will agree with doug that whistleblowers should always be protected and the to do that i advocate the use of software like securely circolo believes so securely and it ill ause people to anonymously whistle blow without fear of somebody dropping their ip address it's there's times when technological things should be used in the service of privacy and there are times when social  methods are used in the defense of privacy it should be privacy for the individual and transparency for the government and that includes government employee  marina has raised some issues regarding transparency and some specific issues regarding shots where we use the databases that we use can you in your role speak to that and address some of the issues that she's brought up in terms of  you know that the privacy concerns the transparency and that fine line that has to be drawn between the two well i'm i appreciate the interest but my focus would be more on the states which i would say failure but lack of success in rolling out a major i t programs over the last ten or fifteen years what you describe is part of that but they've made a number of decisions in the judiciary and tax in d m v in some other places big systems multi million dollar systems and of course vermont health connect there were not managed terribly well maybe some choices were made that could have been improved if they had had additional assistance from professionals but we're headed in that direction i think the desire and the intent of consolidating all of that into one agency which is called a d s now the n c of digital services was well intended i don't know that they planned that properly there's a lot more work to be done and they need to be audited because they're a new entity and all should be monitored but the tax department for example is on i think their third i d system in twenty years yeah we are about to initiate or considering initiating audit at the d m v which is now working with a new id system which doesn't talk to some of the other systems the big elephant in the room is that the agency of human services which has a system called access which is about thirty years old and it's very important it's a problem in fact it's part of the reason that the v eight c the health connect didn't work very well because everybody thought oh this is a chance to do both obamacare here in the state and upgrade from access to something could and integrate them and they overreached they got too close to the sun on that one which is too bad but i'm sympathetic to the those issues about what types of software but i'm more interested in the state getting its act together on i t broadly we're going to move on here and doug five certainly was in the news we had t j donovan here in an earlier  program in a mate that he is forwarding something along the lines of two point five million documents to the auditor of counts or something or the secretary of state do you feel that the state and the auditor of accounts is doing everything it can to get to the bottom of this and make sure that this type of fraud can never happen again well i'll answer the question after we've completed the audit we've begun they have been shipping this information regularly now for a month or two it's amends there's a lot of it there's another traunch or two coming in the next week or so i'd rather not say much about until we look at all in the tiriel but to can you not tell me now where you think the breakdown w i can tell you in general what people already know and i know this from my own experience because i came here as i mentioned before we came on air i came to city hall in the eighty's to work in seato and seato the community an economic development office was created effectively out of the rib of planning because they knew that you couldn't do advocacy and regulatory work at the same time that's a conflict here the state decided to have its own e b five office which was understandable they want to promote development in the north east kingdom and other parts of the state but they didn't see that there would ultimately be that conflict you can't be an advocate in a regulator at the same time so that was a problem and i think it left them unprepared to respond as they might have if they were purely regulators as opposed to promoters so beyond that i does nothing years ok very good marina brown do you feel comfortable that the auditor of accounts and the other entities in state government are doing everything they can to be transparent about what went on what went wrong and that this will not happen again i think they're i think they're suitably cautious about coming about announcing results before the studies are done it's a lot of data to look through hole in the ground in newport when i go by i think a lot a lot of people believed what seemed to me like a like a like a scam from the beginning you know this great thing in the middle of newport with the e p five investment it if the thing is sounds too good to be true it probably is and that's what it sounded like to me when it started i wish some level our heads prevailed and saying no to that will continue on here the auditor's office recently investigated the state's prescription drug benefit programs  do you know about those those findings i do not know ok doug so i'll bring this to you can you speak about those findings and what they have every cover and we we did engage an outside crew of people this is immensely complicated this whole subject the pharmacy benefit managers there's only a few of them left in the country that are substantial their fortune one hundred companies that's how big they are and i think each year now it's up to about twenty five or thirty million dollars just for state employees this is not for medicaid which is even bigger probably but we were interested in whether the department of human resources for its part was properly monitoring and overseeing the work of the so called p because we had seen reports by vendors they had hired to look into this for them and they claimed that e s i express scripts now i think they've merged with somebody else owed the state millions of dollars and no serious effort had been made to collect that money in part i think it's because the contract if you would see it huge your eyes would glaze over it's immensely complicated the whole arrangement is challenging because it's based on the p b m having a relationship with manufacturers and not telling you what they're actually paying for the drugs they're selling or or providing through pharmacies and now they have their own pharmacies on line it's it's challenging furthermore the legislature for reasons i'm not sure about allowed the p b m to decide what parts of th contract could be considered proprietary one of them is the so called spread which is basically their profit and they have to report it to the department financial regulation and to d h are but they can't even give it to the legislature and we saw that information is part of the audit i can't  disclose it but it's a lot of money anyway at the d h our human resources just went through an r f p process i think they're in a mirror signing a contract with the new guys will see how it goes i think they are going to take the findings of this report very seriously and make some improvements n disclosure things and i believe if a drug company does not fulfill its duty in helping the people rather than making profits we should consider nationalizing it for the good of the people on a related subject real quick several years ago a fellow working in my office and i became interested in the fact that if you go to the doctor and say well i think i need these procedures or it's recommended by your physician they can't tell you how much it's in no other part of your life do you commit to spending perhaps thousands and thousands of dollars without knowing where my costs so price transparency in health care is required in statute but they haven't gotten around to it so we did some work and we asked the legislature in the green one care board to focus a little more attention on this we made some progress now the two major insurers on their websites provide some information about what procedures cost to different hospitals around the state but a lot more needs of accounts again your job is to ensure that government funds are used for the purposes intended by law recently the state treasurer found some one time mon to help for the cleanup with the state's waterways is that a problem with the fish and see that those monies are actually dare i mean shouldn't vermonters be expecting that our government is operating its most efficient see as possible so that that money in a sense isn't they are i'm sorry i think you're breaking up no of course of course we should but i should but to be clear i'm pretty sure that what the treasurer beth pearce did in consultation with some other people is identify some options one of them for the short term actually was to use capital funds that's what it was it wasn't laying around right what they did in effect is say for the next couple of years and it was to s last year they agreed as they considered longer term solutions to tap into the capital funds now what that does that that money is already there in the legislature authorize a certain amount of borrowing each year for prisons roads bridges and so forth i think they decided to divert some of that money to the lake i'm not sure they had a plan as exactly to how to use it yet but it wasn't unless i'm mistaken technically laying to where you think that's the accurate and the appropriate uses of those dollars well the lake is is deserves all the attention we can give it whether it should be capital funds as opposed to another source of funding a leaf or the legislature in the governor but that should not be a long term solution no we that money is intended for capital projects and while the lake is everyone's concern capital monies are not intended initially for that purpose capital funds for cleanup of the lake what's the long term solution and obviously it's not coming out of the auditor of accounts office but the auditor obviously has some budget to work on the lake then there's twenty five million dollars of capital work that's not going to be done correctly and next year whatever was planned for whether it's a courthouse or a road is going to be more expensive well at this time we're going to ask for closing statements we transparency i see a number of problems within the state the prisons the police and public records i've done a number of public records requests that i've been asked for thousands of dollars to see the training from from one police department i feel that it ended up being two dollars eighty nine cents but they tried to say to charge me three thousand dollars for a sponge of spreadsheets  there's needs to be a lot of attention on the prison system i think there's no level of scrutiny that since that should not be spare focused on centaurian i think that some very bad things have been do there i've helped people in prisons we're not getting health care and there's a lot of money being poured into the prisons and people aren't getting health care if you want somebody who will look at the hard spots in vermont that's me and i would use the office of auditor as a bully pulpit rather rather than what exactly everything is supposed to be i would be exposing as much data as i could and i would start to create a portal as has been done but i would expand that more to any public records would be put on a portal and the portal does not have to be very expensive i am a former data professional and i understand that you can create a da portal that puts just plain text data or p d f for a few thousand a year or less that's if you want to see somebody who it dig into problems and expose them more of a course of our work we often do risk assessments before we initiate an audit so we need to learn something about the program that's under consideration sometimes you can find a lot of information out of apartments website sometimes not so in my assistant is working very hard to collect all that information we're going to present it to the various departments and agencies and say these guys have all their performance data all their contracts everything you could want is there these guys almost nothing what's the what's the problem again to it so i appreciate it and share your concern for transparency as i said at the outset i enjoy the job i think we're adding value there's a lot more work to be done and i look for people to support me again my thanks to marina brown and to doug hoff for joining us here this evening and a reminder that richard kenyon while he was not here at the table this evening his name is on the ballot and you can vote for him up in two and then including tuesday november sixth election day for a complete calendar of upcoming candidate forums please visit our website eight website at c h seventeen dot tv and do join us tuesday november sixth at seven pm for complete election results here at town meeting