State Auditor Sand addresses controversial laws

     Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand stopped in Jones County late last week as part of his “100 Town Hall” tour across the state.

   Sand spoke to several county residents at a park shelter near Wapsipinicon State Park on Friday, July 14. Two of the biggest topics dealt with Senate File 478, which limits the state auditor’s access to certain documents when conducting an audit; as well as the new private school voucher law.

   “We haven’t yet been denied access any records. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to be,” Sand said.

     Sand said all signs pointed to this bill (now a law) being a very bad idea from the start.

     “The entire national auditing community (National State Auditors Association) told the legislature and the governor that it was a bad idea. The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) almost never comment on pending legislation. They wrote a letter that said they were making an exception here because it was such a bad idea.”

     Someone asked Sand if there were any legal grounds for challenging the law. Sand said he’d only consider such a challenge if he thought the lawsuit would be successful.

     “It was not unconstitutional to pass that law. We’d have to have a specific reason (to file suit) and it would be against Iowa’s constitution,” he explained. “The law in Iowa says that the legislature can define the auditor’s duties. So they wanted to define them in a way that makes it harder for us to catch corruption or waste.”

     In November, Sand won his second term in office, now the lone Democrat in office in Des Moines.

     During his first year in office, he said he “uncovered a record amount of waste, fraud and abuse.” He said clearly the priorities in Des Moines are out of whack.

     “So much of this is about deterrence. So much of the auditor’s office is about keeping people on the straight and narrow who occupy positions of trust and power over your tax dollars. If people know there are consequences, they’ll avoid temptation, right? It’s very simple.

     “If we have a hard time getting documents with what’s going on in state government,” continued Sand, “a lot more people are going to be tempted to steel and not care if money is getting wasted, or not do the hard work of fixing a state program isn’t working very well.”

     Sand was recently interviewed by Chris Hayes with MSNBC. He was quoted as calling this law “comically corrupt.

     “The last thing it’s doing is helping the State of Iowa,” he said.

     Sand was also asked if he thought this law would have passed if he were a Republican.

     “Certainly partisanship is an aspect of it,” he admitted. “But there were a lot of nationwide Republicans who told our governor not to pass the law; it’s a terrible idea.”

     One example, Dave Walker of Alabama, former comptroller general of the U.S. under President George W. Bush.

     “He wrote two letters to the (Iowa) legislature telling them to stop; this is terrible.”

     There were also six Iowa House Republicans who voted against the bill.

     “A lot of them were the most conservative members, the ones who were most willing to stick up against the little group of insiders who run the state government,” Sand said.

     He said the Iowa Senate, where the bill originated, spent just 10 hours introducing and debating the bill before it was passed.

     “They jammed this thing through. It was easier to get people to go along because I have a ‘D’ behind my name,” he said.

     Concerning the voucher law, Sand is also going to have an uphill battle auditing these funds.

     “In the list of documents that makes it harder for us to get are educational records of educational corporations,” he explained. “Educational corporations are schools that are private. So it absolutely makes it harder for us to look at what’s going on.”

     Sand said the bill was designed “to suck a bunch of your tax dollars into a black hole where we’re not going to know what’s going on with it.”

     The law has lots of rules for parents taking advantage of the vouchers, including the fact that the money must go toward tuition first and foremost. Once the tuition is paid, Sand said the schools could spend that money on “anything you could possibly dream up on God’s green earth.” The only thing the law says the schools can’t do is offer rebates to the parents who pull their kids out of private schools before the end of the school year.

     “There is literally no requirement that the money get spent on education,” sand said. “No matter what it is they’re doing with that money, it’s going to be really hard for us to find out because private schools in Iowa don’t have to follow public meetings laws, despite taking public money. They don’t have to follow public records laws. They don’t have to make available to the public an annual audit. If there’s no transparency obligations to the public, how are we going to find out how they’re spending their public money?”

     Sand assured those present at the townhall that the public would hear about whether or not his office was denied access.

     “If anyone is doing an audit and they get denied access to records, you’re limiting the scope of the audit and the auditor is required to disclose that in the audit report. So you’ll always hear about it, no matter what.”