Idaho bill would move state audit agency under GOP control
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Lawmakers introduced a bill Wednesday that would eliminate Idaho’s only bipartisan legislative committee and place the state’s independent auditing agency under Republican control.
Representative Megan Blanksma, the House Majority Leader, introduced the legislation to the House Committee on State Affairs. It would abolish the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee — which has an equal number of Republican and Democratic members — and instead place the Office of Performance Evaluations under the control of the Legislative Council, which has a Republican majority.
This would be a big shift for the Office of Performance Evaluations, established in 1994 to review government agency activities and assess government accountability. The office is not well known outside of the Statehouse, but over the past three decades it has produced more than 170 reports identifying millions of dollars in potential taxpayer savings and highlighting gaps and inefficiencies in countless state programs.
Currently, the legislature can send evaluation requests to the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee, which then selects three or four each year to be assigned to the Office of Performance Evaluation. The in-depth assessments can take months, and the results are presented to the committee at a public meeting and published online.
Blanksma called the bill “quite simple” and compared it to Gov. Brad Little’s 2019 Red Tape Reduction Act, which aimed to streamline administrative rulebooks by eliminating redundant and unnecessary rules.
Rep. John Gannon, a Boise Democrat, said he feared the bill would reduce government transparency and remove controls and balances by introducing partisanship into the process.
“I don’t think anyone should ever fear independent scrutiny of what the state government is doing and how the government is spending its money,” Gannon said.
The State Affairs Committee agreed to introduce voting legislation, clearing the way for a future hearing.
It’s not the first time lawmakers have thought of stripping the nearly 30-year-old state accounting agency of its independence.
In 2013, Idaho Falls Republican Senator Dean Mortimer proposed that the bureau should give Legislative Committee members private previews of reports before they are released publicly. And in 2007, then-Sen. John McGee, a Republican from Caldwell, suggested that the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee should approve the scope of the bureau’s reports, which critics say could open the reports to political influence as committee members try to shield pet programs or agencies from scrutiny .
However, the reports produced by the Office for Performance Evaluation have often resulted in new legislation. A 2017 one identified significant gaps in the state child protection system and led to additional resources being allocated to social workers, foster parents and others. Legislature later established citizen review boards in each of Idaho’s seven health districts in response to a follow-up report.
A 2013 report on the Idaho faculty noted that “there was an undercurrent of despair among educators,” with many leaving the state to find better-paying jobs elsewhere. Shortly after his release, then-Governor CL “Butch” Otter welcomed 20 aggressive recommendations to transform public schools and help attract and retain teachers.
In 2011, analysts determined that more than $11 million could be saved over five years if the Idaho Department of Transportation became more efficient. It also identified $20 million in one-time savings and more than $6 million in annual savings after five years.
And in 2021, the bureau found that most of the state’s emergency services depended entirely on volunteers and lacked resources to meet community needs. In response, lawmakers allocated $2.5 million to rural ambulances, made it easier for local governments to receive a federal reimbursement, and made it easier for emergency services to use a grant to train workers.
Under Blanksma’s legislation, it is not clear whether the bureau’s current staff would be retained or whether the Legislative Council would appoint a new director and analyst.
“None of us party here,” Rakesh Mohan, director of the Office of Performance Evaluations, said on Wednesday. “We just saw the bill. There is a lot of ambiguity and ambiguity about what will happen with OPE.”
