What a coinkydink!
As of July 1, the state auditor will be unable to ask a court to order state agencies and officials under investigation to provide records. Instead, the governor and her cronies will get to decide what gets examined. Iowa Public Radio explains:
It requires a three-member arbitration board to decide if the agency should release the information. One member would be appointed by the governor, one by the agency that’s being investigated (whose director is appointed by the governor), and the third member would be appointed by the auditor.
Iowa Auditor Rob Sand called the law “the worst pro-corruption bill in Iowa history” because it is “akin to letting the defendant decide what evidence the judge and jury are allowed to see.”
Not only that, the law may jeopardize $12 billion in federal funding by preventing the state from complying with federal award requirements and/or requiring more frequent audits, increasing state costs.
In an interview with TPM, Sand said the genesis of the bill is that “in my first term we uncovered more waste, fraud, and abuse than any other state auditor ever had, a record amount.” Some people didn’t like that. That includes $21 million of misspent federal COVID relief funds Reynolds said she’d return in 2020 and, as seen in the video above, $450,000 in late 2021.
“And then, the other piece of it that makes it easy to get other members of the legislature to go along is, I happen to be a Democrat,” Sand said. In fact, he is the only Democrat elected to statewide office in Iowa. But he also said his work has exonerated Republicans, including Reynolds, and has criticized Democrats.
Still, a few Republicans in the legislature opposed the bill, IPR noted. The Republican former U.S. Comptroller and the bipartisan National State Auditors Association also opposed the legislation.
Sand blames authoritarianism at least as much as partisan politics for the law. He pointed out to TPM that the law is “not just an attack on the auditor’s office” but also on the Iowa judicial system. “If authoritarianism is destroying checks and balances and consolidating power into a single place, then I don’t know how else you would describe this,” he said.
What are Reynolds and her cronies so desperate to hide?
