Politics
The Legislature’s noncompliance with the audit passed last year is “slapping voters in the face,” said the state auditor.
State Auditor Diana DiZoglio held a rally on Wednesday to pressure the State House into complying with the audit of the state Legislature voters passed into law last year.
In 2024, 71.6% of voters answered “yes” on the ballot in support of auditing the state Legislature. Nearly a year since the initiative became law, the state has yet to allow the audit to be conducted, DiZoglio said.
State Committeewoman Kathy Lynch led a chant of “audit, audit, audit,” with the approximately 60 rally attendees, many of whom were Republican state representatives, on the steps of the State House.
The rally brought “the most liberal of Massachusetts voters together with the most conservative … to stand up to the Beacon Hill bullies and to say, ‘Enough is enough. We want our lawmakers to follow the law,’” DiZoglio said in her speech after arriving at the rally late.
By not complying with the audit law, the Legislature “is telling us that democracy is essentially dead in Massachusetts and that when we go to vote for something, the election will simply be denied if they don’t like what we say,” DiZoglio said as rally attendees booed and yelled “shame.”
On Oct. 10 on The Grace Curley Show, DiZoglio said the Office of the State Auditor is “there to help, and if anyone in government is pushing back on something as simple as an audit where we’re trying to look at records and process and procedures to help make government work better, one has to wonder: What are they hiding?”
The Speaker of the House Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka are “holding themselves above the law” and “abusing their power” by denying to share records with the Auditor’s Office, which is “deeply disturbing,” DiZoglio said on the radio.
Mariano has consistently declined to say whether the House would ever comply with the audit, telling the Boston Globe in January, “I think compliance is in the eye of the beholder.”
State Rep. Marc Lombardo and several other speakers at the rally urged the Legislature to “open the books” and for rally attendees to “remember this when they’re up for reelection.”
“This is no longer simply about an audit,” DiZoglio continued during the radio show. The issue is about the Legislature’s overall noncompliance with the audit, which is “dictatorship” and a way of “slapping voters in the face,” she said.
The rally aimed to “to hold Beacon Hill accountable to the everyday working families of this commonwealth who just want a seat at the table, who want to know how their tax dollars are being spent,” DiZoglio said on the radio show.
DiZoglio’s legal response to noncompliance with the audit
DiZoglio announced that she and other politicians have proposed a new ballot question that will increase access to public records by making the Legislature compliant with the Public Records Act. The law currently applies to all state government agencies except for the Legislature, judiciary, and the governor’s office, and assumes all government records are public unless they are exempted, in which case local or state agencies must provide access to them.
“If they don’t want to give me the documents that I’ve been requesting as your state auditor, I will just keep working to make sure that they can just give the documents … directly to you, the voters,” DiZoglio said to end her speech.
She also said her office is suing the Legislature for its noncompliance with the audit. However, Attorney General Andrea Campbell told her that her office has not provided enough information to warrant a lawsuit and has blocked the auditor’s office access to court, DiZoglio said.
“I’ve also told the attorney general that if she believes that our office is in any way standing in the way of her enforcing this audit law to sue me directly,” DiZoglio added.
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