Rob Sand

Imagine punishing your kid for telling the truth by taking away their allowance years later. It makes no sense, but that’s the logic behind an assertion by Kraig Paulsen, the Director of the Iowa Department of Management (DOM), that failing to reissue the FY2020 Statewide Single Audit puts future federal funding at risk. That’s not true. The federal government doesn’t withhold funds for previous, resolved audit findings.

The falsehood was in response to the Treasury Department reporting that the Reynolds administration recently provided new information she claims justifies the use of COVID funds to pay her staff’s salaries six years ago.

Not only was the information, which wasn’t given to the Auditor’s Office, turned over six years too late, but it’s also coming to light just four months before an election. But before we look to the future, let’s look back at how this started.

In 2020, the Auditor’s Office asked the Governor for documentation that nearly $500,000 in CARES Act funds were properly administered and used as the federal government intended – to provide COVID relief. This wasn’t a fishing expedition as the administration often claims; we needed the information to perform the FY20 Statewide Single Audit (SSA) and to confirm compliance with CARES Act rules. That was before the Governor signed Senate File 478 – the bill that lets state agencies withhold information that would help the Auditor’s Office uncover waste, fraud, and abuse of your tax dollars. So, when we asked for information about the COVID money, they gave it to us: calendar invites, emails, and a spreadsheet of the Governor’s Office salaries labeled “COVID-19 Personnel Costs.”

But that’s not what the spreadsheet had been labeled months before anyone could have known a pandemic was coming. The label on it then: “FY2020 Shortfall,” meaning not only was the spreadsheet altered to try to justify the use of the funds, but also that the Governor knew well in advance that salary increases she’d given her staff would exceed the amount the legislature appropriated for her. The amount of money pulled from COVID funds to pay salaries also matched the shortfall to the penny.

You can see why I’m skeptical of the “new information” the Governor’s Office recently provided to the Treasury, which, back in 2021, under a different administration, ordered the return of the money. Now, under a politically friendly administration, the Treasury has retroactively determined it was fine. Never mind that the CARES Act rules require states to use the funds for health-related expenditures that weren’t already in their pre-pandemic budgets, that the Reynolds administration doctored documents, or that inflation-adjusted salaries for the Governor’s staff jumped more than 34% from FY19 to FY20.

Those are some of the reasons the Auditor’s Office won’t reissue the FY20 SSA. Also, nowhere in federal law or Government Auditing Standards is reissuance required or recommended. The Auditor’s Office reached its conclusion years ago based on the information available at the time. Reissuing the report would be akin to rewriting history. At the end of the day, this isn’t about one report. It’s about a pattern of people in power misleading Iowans for political gain and keeping taxpayers in the dark, whether by passing a law that promotes fraud, directing state agencies to hide documents, or withholding public records from reporters and legislators.

We teach our kids to tell the truth. We should expect it from public servants. For them, transparency isn’t an option – it’s a requirement, and if it takes cleaning out an office to achieve it, it’s high time to grab a broom.

Rob Sand, a Democrat, is the Iowa State Auditor and a candidate for governor.