and i'm also a member of the st paul chamber board st thomas is proud to sponsor the series of luncheons which are held throughout the year because we believe there are vital for the business community to see informed  engaged in key policy issues that affect all of us is this year draws to a close we thought it would be a good time for a year and update from our state legislative auditor's they track state and government state and local government accountability and they'll share with us some of the metrics that the used to gauge effectiveness and efficiency so we can see what's working well and where efforts a government reform should be focused before we get started however i'd like to take a minute to thank all our sponsors to make this event and other great chamber events possible along with st thomas a co presenting sponsor for the public affairs series is golf public and i'm not sure if we and i'd like to introduce our presenters first as rebecca otto she was elected minnesota's eighteenth state auditor in two thousand and six and was reelected two years ago after receiving the endorsement of the three previous state auditors from both major political parties rebecca's election to statewide office she had many years of public service having taught public school served on a school board and in the legislature she also has experience in the business world having run the successful fifty employee business before turning her focus to public service our second present today also has a history a long history of public service starting on one nine hundred seventy one as a researcher for the minnesota house of representatives jim noble's worked his way the legislative auditor before being appointed to serve a six year term as legislative auditor for the state in one nine hundred eighty three he's been reappointed five consecutive terms since then please give them or more  of those being state board of investment or reinvest about fifty to sixty billion dollars a year as well as a large pension fund real finance authority housing finance agency were like the six largest bank in the state and so on so that i have many responsibilities a staff of about one hundred fifteen in a budget of about nine million depending on the year per year we oversee twenty billion dollars per year spent by our local governments now the way we provide this oversight we don't do a financial in compliance out of it the thirty three hundred units of local government to report to us we do it on some entities we but we do it through auditing we do it's reviewing reporting educating and investigating all raid that's my elevator speech now part of the where oversight system works in minnesota for our local governments is that when privacy p a firms are auditing local governments the ones that we don't do and there's many of them if they run into someone who's misused public funds or they have evidence of fraud they are required by law to report to our office now as you know we've gone through a downturn for some time we're coming out of it but going back to two thousand and seven there were zero what we call six point six seven reports that's the section of statute this requirement isn't and it started increasing over the years to two thousand and ten was a high of eight twenty twelve started settling down but in an economic downturn you tend to have an increase in misuse of funds and it's not just government it's private sector when you're having to cut more and more positions and you have less segregation of duties and you're with your financial staff there can be issues and people have financial pressures in their lives as well now we have another kind of report that we received our system doesn't just rely on our staff finding stuff it relies on the private firms to report to us it also relies on all local government officials whether elected or you're an employee if you have evidence of misuse of funds or fraud and so in a downturn going back two thousand and seven we had thirty four of those it went up sixty four fifty four twenty ten with sixty eight twenty eleven with seventy three so as you can see and we were getting an increased number of of september of two thousand and twelve we had sixty three do these all pan out to be fried now but the good news is we do get reports when people suspect there may be an issue so that's the good news we have a good system in minnesota now these thirty three hundred units of local government report and your financial information to us ok and they also many of them are hotted and so my staff collects that information we review it and then we make it comparable and then we report it so i want to show you cities quickly describe you a sense that what we do our office in terms of evaluating government performance one is reporting of the after fraud but another is looking at their revenues and spend insurers and dad over each year and over time so city revenues are also it's a group that blew top line is the actual actual revenue and as you can see there it went from two thousand three to seven it was an increase in actual dollars and it really flattened off between seven and ten had a little blip between nine and ten that was the federal stimulus funds that went to the cities to help them with projects if you look at inflation adjusted revenues for cities over that ten year period of time they had the two thousand ten level revenues were below two thousand and one which paints an interesting story and then i we can take these and further break them down by category and so this is in inflation adjusted dollars so you know the revenues the only two categories we saw consistent increases in over that ten year period were taxes and you know they were collected and federal grants and part of the federal grants against the stimulus program this one i just love so you know you talk about sources of revenues for cities it's something our office can do to help you understand government performance and what's going on the wind going up is property taxes as a percent of total revenues and the other one going down is intragovernmental revenues as a percent of total revenues and so for cities as a group they're relying more and more on property taxes as a source of revenue into government revenues were dropping person personally because of a change the state made back in two thousand and three and it was a legislative session but you can see in one in ten there was again a little increase and that would be those the federal stimulus funds in finally the expenditure line this is really important for government performance and kind of what's going on  actual expenditures you know they were an increase but then they started bumping around six and then the economic downturn they kept bumping so in actual dollars in inflation adjusted expenditures two thousand and ten levels were below two  and one which to me is a pretty interesting thing to take a look at and i wanted to show you in inflation adjusted dollars that category that went up through that ten year period of time you know consistently was public  safety one of the big things that are cities do is streets and highways and public safety so be understandable and i think that nine eleven may play into that too in that there were a lot of there was no equipment that local governments had to buy in case we had another you know major incident with communication and  things so that was interesting we look at it i'm reserve fund balances in terms of cash flow for city as you well know about cash flow and we want them to have about five months worth of revenue to cash flow in between revenue chunks of r they get from the state and they're in a safe zone they're good they're good as a group another thing government performance had to look at the pressures that the cities might be facing if we have any future state budget shortfalls we know we're facing another one that impacts some of them in terms of getting their aid cut from the state and local government aid the are a cliff that's the stimulus funds they're going so the city will have to deal with not having their act in the whole market downturn had an impact on property taxes people staying in their homes forfeitures and so you have a slightly eroding tax base but luckily home values are coming back up but it does put pressure on cities and it can have an impact on their performance what have i seen in response to this the difficult time sometimes you see good things cities have been trying to risk reduce expenditures trying to do more collaboration cooperation and i'm seeing more of sharing financial  just interesting and it's happening especially in greater mo so they can't afford full time person but they need a qualified person so sometimes they're splitting somebody up which is working out well they're sharing resources they've been doing that for a long time some entities report have been reporting way to us but we did see improvement this year when they don't report on time if they have all the government aid they don't get it because it's really it's a carrot and that's not a good thing to have happen in a downturn to how do we promote awareness about increased risk of fraud in an economic downturn or just in general we educate the auditors who are out there doing the work we educate local officials on how to avoid the problems that might occur in a downturn we work to educate the public because they're our eyes and ears and we do conduct investigations and we have the city on a project which is where we take all the audits we have not conducted on studies review them and look for trends and we do send letters out to some cities who have either too many findings questions there was a local public pensions investment study group bill that my office ran i chaired and we pulled together all the local public pension plans along with state board of investment review their statutes we had auditors in the room brokers in the room we had all kinds of folks and they helped inform the process we overhauled the statutes to make it easier for pension plans to be compliance easier for the auditors to audit the entities to make sure they're in compliance and so it was a really great project in the past and so it was one of those good news kind of things my office responded this is really tiny entities that get audited once every five years and their revenues are fairly small privacy pure c p a firms that you know be really great if we do something short of a full blown on it for these entities because they don't even really understand what it means when they get it so my office developed agreed upon procedures for this release niceties which is a better and product for the users to help them make sure they understand what they're doing well and it also has reduced cost for them which to me is a really important thing that we can do and we ask the c p a firm street view it for us and give us feedback so we work as a team with the private sector as well there's another thing that james asked me to mention the council on local results and innovation i serve on that as well as the collaborative governance council but this particular one developed a performance measurement for cities and actually counties cities and counties voluntarily participate in the program if they do and we certify them saying they've met all the requirements they get a little extra local government aid and they're exempt from lobby limits there's a report on my website that shows the results so they're they're implementing performance measurements it might be around how few say do you feel in the community or you know road and pavement condition rating you know whatever you can have hard numbers and you can survey your community and then they report that out to the community and they're measuring performance so it's connecting people's tax dollars to what they're getting and creating a more constructive conversation with your government which is i think really important hello it's good to be with you first tell you a little bit about the office of the legislative auditor you've already heard one of the things that often comes up about the difference between the legislative water in the state auditor and i know the terms are very confusing that the state auditor does not at the state the legislature studied state government it was called a loan executive action program or elite and they said that the legislative branch really ought to be the branch of government that has the tool of accountability and oversight of state government and so they created the office of the legislative auditor as a professional nonpartisan office similar to the congressional g a o or government accountability office and they decided that the way to divide the jurisdiction over audit ng was to have th state auditor audit local government and then the state auditor could also as rebecca just indicated serve as a as an officer within that branch of government without creating any sort of independence or conflict of interest issues so the state auditor audits local units of government the legislative auditor has jurisdiction audit state government and we have really brought in deep jurisdictions throughout state government we audit virtually everything in the executive branch from the governor's office down to the board of dentistry we also have jurisdiction audit within the judicial branch but the one thing we don't audit in the state government is the legislative branch there is one significant difference though which isn't in the law that i've dayton was previously the state auditor as was arnie carlson and so there is this pattern now you might have noticed though that it's quite different with the legislative author and that is i'm currently serving my fifth six year term as you can do the math that means i will soon have been legislative auditor for thirty years my term be up next year and i may even ask for another six year term so i think the message there is the state auditor goes on to greater glory there is no greater glory than being legislated let me tell you a little more about who we are and what we do we do have a lot of financial lot of work that we do we audit the states annual financial statements gap based financial statements we go into various departments and agencies of state government and audit their controls and compliance we also have a program evaluation division in the office it's the smaller unit within the office of the legislative auditor but it's one that really i think much more directly serves the legislature and its information needs so every year we go to all the legislators and we ask them what are the concerns and issues that you have about the operation of state government or a program or a function and sometimes frankly that's a program or function that is carried out locally but they do want an evaluation in we leave the financial auditing to rebecca's office but we might go in  evaluate for example special education which is a program that is funded by the state and the federal government but it ministered by school districts or we may do an evaluation of county programs for human services most all state human service programs are administered by counties so there is sometimes a little bit of confusion about again the jurisdiction that the legislative auditor goes in and does these evaluations and again we do them because we go to legislators every year and we ask them what are your concerns what would be helpful to you in terms of an independent nonpartisan outside book they get a lot of information from a lot of sources and those sources often have an interest in promoting that program whether it's ethanol or the governor's q q com program or jobs easier all of these various programs that are in state government and there's a lot of information about them and frankly sometimes legislators get a little confused about the conflicting messages about whether or not things are performing well or not and so they will bring those issues to the office a legislative auditor and ask us to do an evaluation we get about seventy or eighty requests every year from legislators we can only with the staff we have to about six or eight and so we have a mechanism within the legislative audit commission which by the way is the group that appoints me for that six year term it's a bipartisan group of legislators equal representation house and senate are the minority majority caucuses and they appoint me and they also choose these six or eight evaluation topics that we look at every year from all the ones that are suggested by their colleagues and they have some criteria to work that number down to the ones that they finally select just to give you a list of the ones we're working on now for example and it tells you another key thing about our office and that is we get into virtually everything which is often a challenge because a lot of the programs that we evaluate are quite complex  and we're getting into them again as a kind of an independent outside group fresh and so we have to take two or three people on our program evaluation staff and get them spending all of their time thinking reading talking interviewing about nothing but that subject for the next six or eight months so they can really deliver a report that is well informed give good background information give the legislature an idea of where some of the issues are that need attention and so currently we are looking at conservation easements a really growing area because of the legacy funds but it predates that but legacy funds are really being used a lot to buy conservation easements to protect land without actually buying it because there's a lot of concern about the amount of land that the state owns and is taken off the tax rolls so one mechanism for doing some of the environmental and habitat protection that we want to do we do through in conservation easements we're also looking at law enforcement use of state databases some of you may have noticed that there's a lot of controversy around about police officers accessing people's private data and your driver's license actually if you didn't know this that is a private piece of information that you're asked to show to everybody in the world but a police officer is not supposed to go in and look at that without a business purpose and in fact it's been found that a number of officers have been looking at people's pictures i don't understand that but they have some attraction to looking at certain people's pictures and it's become a real privacy concern and so we're looking at that we're also looking at the way the state reimburses dentists for the services they provide under the medicaid program a very contentious complicated area of state government and i sometimes ask myself when we get the list i mean why why are all of the ones we get kind of contentious and complicated aren't there any simple things for us to look at and i guess not but there is a lot of concern among dentists about being able to provide the kind of service that they are required to provide and being adequately remunerated by the state of course there's enormous pressure to hold down costs for medicaid one of our fastest growing programs both at the state and federal level and we often put the squeeze on the vendors that provide the service through holding down reimbursements we're looking at that and we are looking at special education i mentioned that is one of the issues we are also looking at  what is called state operated human services and that's a whole wide panoply of services that the state actually operates with state employees it would surprise i think a lot of people to know that most of the medical and human services that the state obtains we obtain through private sector vendors but there are some human services that we provide through an actual state operated facility one of those for example is the state security hospital and there's been a lot of issues about the operation of that about the people that are civilly committed there and so we're looking at that and a number of other those facilities at the state operate so that just gives you some sense of the breadth of what we get into more recently for example we've also looked at something that might be of interest to some of you and that is governance of transferred in the twin cities issued i think two years ago with a lot of concern in these issues being raised about the governance structure at the metropolitan council and how it relates to local communities so we do those evaluations we publish the results in eighty ninety page reports with four page summary so legislators can quickly get in and we go over and present those results highlighting some of the issues that we think need legislative attention and frankly i think over the years the legislature has been quite diligent in giving us time and consideration attention for those reports but getting to results is not always easy because again a lot of what we're looking at is complicated there are a lot of constituencies that are impacted one issue for example that we looked at two years ago which is going to come back again as you probably know from media reports and that is civil commitment of sex offenders and i use that as an example just because you can go out and get good information accurate objective information in presented to legislators and they can give due consideration to that but they obviously work in an environment where their decisions have to be impacted in or are they have to take into consideration a lot of different factors called politics and i know that sometimes that is kind of a dirty word among people but believe me in my world in what i see among legislators what that really means is they have to care about their constituents in the public the values and interests that are out there and so the facts alone no matter how accurate how ject if well not always give them the magic key that unlocks the doors to what we ought to do in special education or law enforcement use of databases or what to do with the growing number of civilly committed sex offenders that we are keeping locked up so that's kind of the world i work in and i will in there because i really want to hear what interests you and answer your questions great question you know ideally it would be built in and it wouldn't necessarily just be the legislative auditor doing it but we often say that there is an evaluation in certainly a monitoring function that needs to go on at the department at the program level and if they see that as the responsibility they will start building into the development and design of that program the kinds of considerations of objectives goals and data systems that would allow them and the office a legislative auditor to do that about you aisha and that's i think one of the biggest challenges we often face when we go and evaluate program this probably won't surprise you that sometimes we're not real clear what we're trying to accomplish i give you one example there's a program in minnesota several hundreds of millions of dollars call integration revenue has a great purpose in many people's minds and that is to do something about the challenges of disparity in educational performance about creating a multicultural environment for kids and so we give money to certain school districts to further that it's a very very complicated allocation formula on who gets the money and how much they get and so we did that evaluation and what we found is first of all at a very general level it sounds like a good program but when you get it down to specifically what you're supposed to do with the money and what you're supposed to be accomplishing and how you're going to measure it it was very very unclear and so one of the major recommendations we had back to the legislature is state more much more clearly what it is you're trying to accomplish so that people out in school districts can set goals set up monitoring systems to know when they're meeting that objective let me just mention quickly one other thing which you may have noticed last week we issued an investigative report  on a program that the state was funding through giving money to a nonprofit private vendor it was to reduce pregnancy in the african american teen population and we found a lot of irregularity but what i was particularly disturbed about was that there really had never been any follow up by the department of health to determine if we were accomplishing anything now in the way this individual we used was using the money for personal expenses rather than the purpose of the program we couldn't have been but they could if found that out either through better financial oversight or through more program monitoring what are we accomplishing how are we going to know whether we're being successful or not well carrying on a little too long here but it's a great question that ought to be built in on pilot projects long term programs at the administrative level as well as being done by  yes definitely not only cost but cost will be a factor you know again we do these programs because we're trying to accomplish something so in addition to costs we want to look at what we're achieving as well without and there's always risk that i'm going to ramble on here so let me try to really again i just want to emphasize how much state government operates in partnership with the private sector both for profit we you know we build roads not because we have a lot of state vehicles and people to go out and build roads we hire that from contractors in the private sector but as many of you undoubtedly kno we as i said deliver a lot of human services through vendors we also buy medical services through the private sector and so in looking at state operated services one of the big questions is could sum up this be better accomplished through more contracting and grant making with nonprofit private organizations  now there's a big push and there has been for a long time and i think there's a lot of good in it for privatization for government not to try to do a lot but to partner with the private sector both profit in nonprofit but i have to say on what this is one of the messages that i preach constantly and that is we cannot just give the money over to a vendor and then walk away without an adequate amount of monitoring and accountability and frankly there is a whole set of skills that state employees or local employees need in knowing how to effectively manage that relationship from writing up the grant writing up the contract monitoring it properly without meddling without being too bureaucratic too much red tape and we have a lot of examples of where we have failed frankly to do a good job more examples maybe of where we simply turned the money over walked away and said ok we're done we gave the money three hundred thousand two million ten million whatever that is vendor in the private sector they'll get the job done it's still public money and there has to be some mechanisms of monitoring and accountability and building those relationships is a very complex and challenging enterprise and frankly i think it's where government falls down and we need to do a better job that's wanted to add one small piece of that that's really important that i think about with a lot of cuts that have occurred in government over and over and over and over and over sometimes we go to fire i really worry about some of the state agencies and even all the governments having the people to monitor the sub recipients of the money it's a real factor  doing it i bet you have the time or more it goes back to not even having the people to do the work they're scrambling to try to get daily stuff done which is not the way you would run your business and they wouldn't wasn't aware in my business you want to make sure that you are able to do a good job in the areas that are really really important here operation of them it when they are is there they deliver a service a specific service that doesn't necessarily stay within normal jurisdictional boundaries so it's still over between cities and counties whatever else and we have many of them and they can be run water spoil  hospitals airports and normally yes they have a lot of requirements you have the teeny tiny ones that will fall outside of that but they get audited my office actually is an annual financial report and special districts in minnesota all that data is available on my website the only problem with the special districts in minnesota is that statute wasn't very clear on the other requirements and so my office got some legislation through early on that made it very clear what the requirements were and the reporting requirements so my office in terms of the list we have of those entities may not be totally complete because it's voluntary reporting now if we find more we contact them and say you're very to report and you know that we report out the information and so in a way that's a great great question but we provide that accountability transparency is exactly right governments that it is tax money and there has to be accountability and transparency for those over thirty three hundred units which includes the districts that's what my office unction it's to make sure we know who they are what they're spending you know what kind of revenue they're taking of them as well but the media doesn't cover a lot and i don't know if it's a confusing topic for them i know when people figure it all out they have great interest legislature actually recently i think in the last year or two wanted to know how many taxing into tuesday we have out there at the local level and that's these special districts or there are other interests it's just hard to get it i'll continue to try to educate folks about them but it's a great question it's a year so they answer it for you driving forces that are powerful in government that may not be as powerful in the private sector i mean one of the things we don't have that is very powerful in the private sector is the marketplace we simulate that in various ways but never will really accomplish the force of the marketplace to encourage good performance but the other thing that complicates the world of government and it's so ubiquitous that i think we sometimes fail to think about it and that is the power of the boundary that we draw also many balladry that define who is responsible for what who can tax what and they are and they do there are many of them they seem to multiply particularly for the special district taxing authorities and all of this brought that topic to be on our evaluation agenda a year ago again the state auditor has jurisdiction to do all the audit work at the local level but legislators ask us to kind of step back and look at the local government from the possibility that we could maybe do a better job of encouraging if not forcing consolidation and just within the twin cities i'm sure you all know that if you drive very far you go through multiple  jurisdictions and do we need all of those separate entities carved out with their separate city councils mayor's staff buildings and all that sort of thing so we issued a report that you might be interested in that kind of gives some information background information on the local units of government and the possibilities of having fewer of them i think my last count was there like twenty seven twenty seven hundred different local jurisdictions not counting special taxing authorities so there are a lot of them now it gets to be a very sensitive issue though with probably even with you if for example roseville in st paul said wanted to consolidate or if you lived in lauderdale really really really tiny little town but talk to the people in lauderdale if they want to become a part of talking heights in roseville or minneapolis or no they don't because there are certain characteristics that they control by having their own little city that they want to keep and so it is a very very tough thing one of the first assignments i had when i went to work for the legislature back in one thousand seventy one was see if you can figure out any ways we could encourage our eighty seven counties to consolidate or just share human service offices that's still a topic that's being talked about a lot so it is one of those pieces of government that i think does sometimes inhibit us it makes it much more complicated to function but it's just one of those realities that's very very difficult to change there's a lot of collaboration that occurs where they do share or seventy counties will do one service together so you can reduce your administrative burden but you're still getting the service out there and it's happening all over there was one that was trying to be done in southeastern minnesota that has hit moment maybe one too many speed bumps but it's been done for many years wrong state another that i want to give some comfort to you know some of the special districts my office gets calls from the public saying this these folks tax me and they're doing this or they're not doing this we actually do special trainings with them because we were getting way too many calls and so we always go and be as transparent as possible understand how to manage resources and be you know really good stewards of those tax dollars and we've actually been able to have the call volume go way down because these folks do a better job so we will mean if you don't mind i'm going to start and then you can finish with really interesting is when bad things happen in that happen in the private sector you know you'll get standards change and you know banks have so many tough mudder requirements that some of them say we can have this in business couple of big statements and pensions public pensions they don't believe that there's enough transparency in government and pension plans are going to pour in or is it really on the face of their financial statements in a different way than they ever have used to be in the notes so i would s that the private sector as well as government we all want to do a really excellent job whether you have shareholders or your government and you have taxpayers government tends to get held they don't exist in the wrong way we get held to a much higher standard because our money is not our money it's the taxpayers money and so there are things we do that are sometimes redundant and more thorough because it's got a minute we have to otherwise taxpayers you know they will revolt or they'll say  we don't trust our government and that's not a very good situation so i want to make sure it does a great job but i would say you know when bad things happen the private sector you're seeing change are sinners eventually change too so i think the folks that are setting our standards and regulators and everyone else are always watching you know if there's something bad happening could it be happening in the present or could it be happening in government does that make sense auditing alone is not going to get us to where we need to be it really has to be incorporated in first of all to management there's a concept in already called tone at the top that we believe really does set the tone for whether accountability at the those kinds of things really filter filter down into an organization the people in an organization see people at the top not respecting ethics or the law it does set a bad tone in organizations can go quite sour when that occurs and i think one of the issues that we've been dealing with as a nation in the private sector is what has been the tone at the top particularly among some financial institutions but it's a concept that i think applies at the  governmental level as well in management and in leadership and that's why we strongly encourage for example that commissioners in leaders in state government have some mechanism of internal watering as you mention in fact one of the good things the current commissioner of health did when he became commissioner was he set up within his  organization first time that i'm aware of an internal audit function now unfortunately he came over to my office and told one of our audit managers that i was happy to see her go over there and we do have a lot of our staff that go into internal audit operations around state government and elsewhere as well and guess how we found the impropriety an inappropriate use of the grant money over three hundred fifty thousand dollars of grant money over several years it was by that internal auditor that the commissioner brought into his organization she started looking at some of the documents that were coming in that were asking reimbursement for some of the supposed expenses didn't look right so she called her colleagues in the office of legislative auditor and said i think we need to investigate this so again there is a role and an important role for people on the outside doing independent work like rebecca and i do s firms but but if people think that is enough i think they're making a sad mistake to think to really get where we want to be in terms of ethics in the private sector performance and accountability in the public sector good question well we start in terms of the selection process by having this bipartisan commission which i think does help and even the selection subcommittee is always bipartisan now do some people though look at some of the topics that are selected as maybe having a little bit of a partisan edge yeah they do and so when the governor's programs are selected by the legislative audit commission people think going after the governor and frankly i do think that for a period of time some governors think that the legislative auditor is after them but you know i think the proof a t least in terms of what is produced it is in the report yes there may actually have been some partisan motivation on the part of some legislators to choose a topic i know for example over the years we always had republicans wanting to pick the programs on the iron range you know the kind of job type programs and then they turn around and say well let's go after jobs either an hour or so there can be that kind  of effort although i must say we have luckily had members of the legislative audit commission over the years that have really tried to tamp that down and if there is a particular partisan legislator that wants to bring issues that really are just out of a partisan motivation they try to remind them that this function is really a nonpartisan professional office where i also have frankly faced a challenge is when i'm asked to do an investigation that can raise an issue and i really as legislative auditor have the authority to launch an investigation unilaterally and i can either do that because the things i see that i think need to be investigated or things that are brought to me as a request early in the plenty administration there were a lot of allegations about a settlement that was made by the commissioner of commerce with the banking and insurance company in florida the attorney general my catch raised a lot of very partisan issues about that settlement got kicked around for quite a while and finally people came to me and said you really need to investigate this so we can have an independent outside nonpartisan look but the environment had become so heartless and that i really feared that it would appear that now i was going to be used by the l to go after governor plenty so i sat there and thought for a while and said this is something that does need to be investigated i think the governor and the public deserve  an independent nonpartisan examination and in depth examination of these issues they are quite serious by the way the allegation was that the settlement came in return for a campaign contribution to the governor from the insurance company that was the allegation so i sat down and wrote myself a letter unsaid dear mr noble's would you investigate this and then i put a bunch of names at the bottom i put the majority leader in the senate the minority leader in the senate the majority leader in the house and minority leader and then i put the governor and the attorney general and i walked a letter around and said you want an investigation sign this letter and they all did and we did the investigation and i think people then could not perceive that it was motivated just by politics and certainly in the final result they couldn't either so it is a very political world that we work in and yet our function is one that is supposed to be nonpartisan and professional and we both you know have our challenges in maintaining that i certainly have that challenge because i'm appointed by the legislature  although for secure term which helps i cannot be removed during that six year term but i work in a very partisan environment lot of pressures there are lot of people coming at me with a lot of issues to deal with rebecca as an elected official always in not just rebecca but anybody who's ever been elected state auditor it's always an easy allegation oh you did this audit out of some political motivation i think we both learned as for structure but you know if they're getting back out of that are floating it's coming so i would say that the performance measurement system is really to me a really great thing that's happening to the council will result in innovation and we had better participation in two thousand and eleven and dropped off a little in twelve and i'm on a counselor job now is to review the measures we put out review the system see how it's working and if we can get a lot more participation because anytime you're measuring performance you guys do that business right when i was in business i used to do these big graphs and charts to charter progress over time and if there was a downturn how that impacted our bottom line what else could we do so it's government tracking is just i don't know it's measurable they should measure and then they should have that inform conversation with the tax payers because to me it's easy to say rhetoric and it's easy to rip down the government to me it's harder to do your work measure your performance and if you've been cutting and cutting cutting in near the fire response time is not acceptable anymore and you've lost a certain number of lives in that or property business whatever else you can have that inform conversation again you know are we doing the right thing should we with your taxpayer should we be increasing revenues a little bit because we feel that fire response time needs to be improved and have you done all you can to make sure that you're when you respond that it's that it's real because i know some communities have looked at that they analyzed how many calls they had and how many were actual real events and a lot of them weren't and they are trying to figure out how to improve on that so these are all things so to me that those performance measures and system are critical and i want to continue to promote that in our group we have to spend tast a group of city county people there is so from target corporation on the council and we're reviewing the whole system and we really want to work to promote this in government i think it's a good thing you know we just went through two year period in the legislature where reform was a very frequently used word the people came into the legislature it was a change in the leadership in the majority party and i think there was a very strong feeling that the folks that were elected had a mandate to produce reform and i think that's great i'm sure all of you do too but i think what i've observed over the years is that reform takes a lot of work takes a lot ever and you often have to kind of build an infrastructure that supports it and you have to sometimes change management's approach to things and relationships with employees you have to maybe create some data and systems that might even cautious some money and you might have to really think through in a really hard way what are we trying to accomplish and how are we going to measure that and what kind of instruments are we going to use and what i have found is that sometimes there's a wave that comes in at the legislature of new people who have sort of some some things that they've gone out and campaigned for that are called reform and and they ma get them in acted but in i don't mean to be too critical here they think then they've really accomplished something i will even point to an example that we therians this last  two years at the legislature we created something called the sunset advisory commission the idea has been around quite awhile that you would put a terminations date on every organization in state government bring it up for review and it would have to sort of the people there prove that they are doing their work in accomplishing what needs to be done and that spending money wisely well first thing is there are a lot of programs a lot of agencies that you have on your agenda in just working through them just quantitatively working through one in a time is a lot of work and then some of those programs have very complex programs so you know look at the department human services or transportation or health you're dealing with many different programs and then you're dealing with constituencies and interests that support in want those programs i know this last round on sunset for example look mostly at some of the occupational licensing organizations that we have with the idea that we have a lot of them and maybe we could do away with some of them but after a certain amount of effort on the part of the sunset commission we got to just one really that they could find that they wanted to sunset and do away with and that was the combative sports commission which had one employee and then after the interest groups kind of rolled out and said no no we've got to have regulation for combative sports it's violent we need to regulate it as a state you know there's literally blood on the floor after those guys are done but they needed i think because of some political pressure to say the sunset commission worked and they did got rid of something but then they had to go on the search to find where could they put it in some other department that it could be not counted as a separate standalone regulatory commission but it would just be a part of where and literally it was weeks of searching around and not finding anybody who really wanted to be the home for the combative sports commission they went to the department of health and they said no way you know that's everything we against folks that public safety no they don't want any either it's so anyway the point is that sometimes reform is hard and and so when you talk to public officials legislators and others who have a reform agenda watch and see and make sure that they stick with it over a period of time because it isn't done easily