State Auditor Diana DiZoglio is pushing for passage of a ballot question this year that would officially authorize her to audit the operations of the Massachusetts Legislature, but she’s not waiting until the results are in.
DiZoglio on Monday released a performance audit examining activities of the state House and Senate from Jan. 1, 2021, through Dec. 31, 2022, noting several areas where her office says the Legislature, which is exempt from both the state’s public-records and open-meeting laws, could become more transparent.
Her recommendations include making the Legislature’s website more user-friendly and reviving a nonpartisan research office for lawmakers.
The audit was conducted without cooperation from the House and Senate, where top Democrats maintain it’s a constitutional violation for DiZoglio to probe the operations of a separate branch of government. Attorney General Andrea Campbell backed them up last year, finding DiZoglio lacks the legal authority to audit the Legislature without its consent.
“The audit team, they’re to be commended,” DiZoglio said. “Even in the face of being told that they weren’t going to be cooperated with, for the first time that anyone in my office can remember, they still did their jobs. They looked at what they were able to look at and they shined a light on some of the dark corners of the state Legislature and did so with the intent to make government work better.”
A Methuen Democrat, DiZoglio clashed with legislative leaders around transparency when she served in both the House and Senate.
Her office’s new 77-page report flagged that Massachusetts lacks a “legislative services bureau,” a nonpartisan division that provides services like bill-drafting, research and fiscal analysis to lawmakers and committees. The audit said Massachusetts is the only state in the country without some version of that resource, and recommended that the Legislature re-establish the Legislative Research Bureau that was active on Beacon Hill prior to the 1990s.
Such a division, DiZoglio said, would “provide an opportunity for legislators to best represent their constituents and not have to rely on the words of legislative leaders who claim that a bill may have a strong impact.”
The audit also recommended simplifying navigation of the state Legislature’s website, as a way to “increase transparency and the public’s ability to hold the Legislature accountable for ensuring an equitable mode of making laws.” It says other states, like Connecticut and Oregon, offer clearer breakdowns of the lawmaking process and easier-to-find information on the actions taken in House and Senate sessions.
The National Conference of State Legislatures has twice presented Massachusetts with its Online Democracy Award, which recognizes a legislative body “whose website makes democracy user-friendly in an outstanding way.” The state’s most recent award, in 2018, commended the website’s design and budget-tracking feature.
House Speaker Ron Mariano knocked DiZoglio’s audit as politically motivated.
“The purported audit of the Legislature released by the Auditor today confirms only one thing: the Auditor has abandoned all pretext of faithfully performing her statutory responsibilities in favor of using her office for pure political self-promotion and electioneering,” Mariano, a Quincy Democrat, said in a statement. “The Auditor should instead be focusing on her statutorily mandated reviews, as she continues to underperform her predecessors in the completion of that important work.”
A spokesperson for Senate President Karen Spilka, an Ashland Democrat, similarly described DiZoglio as “singularly focused on the upcoming election and promoting her ballot question” and said lawmakers will “keep our focus” on their legislative efforts around issues like free community college, gun reform and climate change.
The audit lands about two weeks before the Nov. 5 election, with early and mail-in voters already making their decisions on Question 1, which would write the auditor’s power to examine the Legislature into law.
DiZoglio said the report can show voters what a legislative audit looks like.
“You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” she told GBH News. “If we withhold this audit until after the election, then the opposition would claim that the office was trying to hide information pertaining to what an audit would look like. We thought it was important that we kept our word, and that we released this audit in the spirit of transparency to fully empower people to be able to make their own decisions regarding what they think about this performance audit being conducted of the Legislature.”
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