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Multnomah County Auditor Jennifer McGuirk made an impassioned plea to wrest control of her budget from the chair of the County Board of Commissioners today.
Much of the auditor’s work involves scrutinizing county programs that are under the chair’s control, McGuirk told the board. A conflict of interest exists because the chair could use his or her purse strings as a cudgel after unflattering audits.
“I don’t think, being in your roles, you can understand the level of anxiety that I experience every time we issue a report because I don’t know if it’s going to be used against us,” McGuirk said in today’s presentation. “That’s not about any particular chair. It’s about the nature of the system we have.”
McGuirk, who was elected auditor in 2018, has often pushed for more funding for her office, and for greater independence. Under the current system, the county chair and the auditor meet to determine the office’s budget. That figure goes to the board of commissioners, along with the rest of the budget, and rarely changes, McGuirk said.
If the county were truly committed to accountability, one of its stated values, it would set the auditor’s budget as a percentage of the county’s general fund, McGuirk said.
“Decisions about funding of the audit organization should not be controlled by managers or officials subject to audit,” McGuirk said. “I’m not speaking in hyperbole when I say that there are administrations that will do all they can to reduce the power of auditors, ombudspersons, and inspectors general.”
Lest there be any doubt, see what the Trump administration has done to disempower the U.S. General Accounting Office, McGuirk said. Trump and allies in Congress have sought to discredit the GAO during the agency’s investigation of Trump’s budget cuts.
In addition to fixing the allocation of funds to the auditor, the county should also increase it, McGuirk said. Compared with jurisdictions of similar size, Multnomah County has far fewer auditors—just 10, compared with 15 in similar places.
In the current fiscal year, which began July 1, the auditor’s budget is 0.45% of the county general fund, McGuirk said, leaving it “underresourced.” The fixed amount should be closer to 0.75%, she said, to “right-size” the office.
County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson reminded the board that she is “legally obligated” to present budgets to the board and that the “auditor is a part of that.” She thanked McGuirk for her suggestions and said there had been “increases” in the auditor’s office over the years. They have talked about adding more staff, too, Vega Pederson said.
Pushing back with “context,” McGuirk told the commissioners that, except for the addition of an ombudsperson, the auditor’s office had no increase in staff from the late 1990s through fiscal year 2023, which ended on June 30 of that year.
“That’s a really long period of time,” McGuirk said.
Worse yet, McGuirk said she got a bump in staff that year only because she had been trying to boost funding through the county’s charter review committee, which meets every six years and had been in session, delivering a report in August 2022.
“I have no way to prove this,” McGuirk said, “but it’s my personal opinion that the only reason I got any staff that year was largely because I was trying to bring something before the charter review committee. I don’t want any future auditor to have to go about it like that.”
