BRATTLEBORO-While nobody actually likes to be audited, Vermont’s elected state auditor is charged with closely watching how the state spends its money. Last week, Deputy Auditor Tim Ashe came to town to explain exactly what the auditor does and why he wants the top job.
The current state auditor, Doug Hoffer, won the job in 2013. Now he is retiring, and Ashe, who has been the deputy auditor for the last five years, wants to step up.
Ashe, a Democrat, is running against Poultney Republican Ivar Kronick.
The lighthearted Ashe, 49, was a state senator from 2009 to 2021 and served as president pro tempore of the State Senate from 2017 to 2021. Before that, he was a Burlington city councilor.
Much of Ashe’s work life has been spent in affordable housing advocacy. He ran a private consulting company doing non-profit development from 2017 to 2021. For a decade, he was the affordable housing developer of Burlington’s Cathedral Square, a national leader in developing quality housing for seniors and people with disabilities and other challenges.
“The through line through all of these has been analytic work, budget development, operational budgeting, and compliance,” Ashe told The Commons. “In the past, when I campaigned for state Senate, I didn’t say, ‘Look at my experience with compliance and satisfying federal and state requirements.’ But that was a large share of the work I did.”
Currently he is the board president of the Community Health Centers of Burlington. He has a master’s degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and he graduated summa cum laude from the University of Vermont.
Five years ago, Hoffer picked him to be his deputy.
“Doug needed a deputy who complemented his skills,” Ashe said. “He wanted someone who, I think, in his eyes, had the analytical and policy chops. Someone who understood how policies go from being an idea to execution, which is really important.”
Ashe thinks the duo has been “pretty successful together.”
“I think the office has always put out good work, and I hope it’s just kept getting better,” he said. “And if I had been [responsible for] a small piece of that, I feel really, really good about it.”
What does a state auditor do?
The Vermont State Auditor’s Office is responsible for monitoring and — when needed — offering corrections to how the state is spending its money. The office has a staff of 16 and a budget of $5 million.
By law, the office has two legally required and distinct functions.
One is to prepare the state’s annual financial report, the “single audit,” of the state’s use of federal money. For the past two decades, that task has been jobbed to an outside firm.
“That’s a big chunk of money,” Ashe said. “It is paying for an army of people who work for an outside agency to do that work. Our office is responsible for that. We are the ones who manage that contract. Basically, they’re working on our behalf. I oversee that part in my deputy role.”
The reason most states choose an outside agency to do the core financial audit, Ashe said, is that these companies have the scale to be able to perform the work in a timely way each year. In a small office like Vermont’s, having a few people out sick could jeopardize how quickly an audit gets done.
“And if the audit is not done on time, the rating agencies who determine the state’s credit worthiness look askance,” Ashe said. “So it could actually have negative implications.”
Another benefit of an outside contractor is that it audits other states as well.
“So if they see problem areas that are popping up in other states, they can then kind of shine a brighter light in Vermont to make sure we’re not falling prey to some of the same mistakes in terms of how we use federal money or other things like that,” Ashe said. “From a financial management point of view, I think Vermont does pretty well.”
The second audit the office must do by law is a financial audit of the state’s sheriff departments every two years.
Monitoring state agencies
Once the office has fulfilled its legal duties, it has some leeway in choosing specific aspects of state government to audit. It issues public reports on its findings.
Sometimes its suggestions are adopted, and sometimes not.
“While most people just intuitively suspect, we make sure that the state is using its money legally and putting the dollars in the right accounts and that the flow of funds is following the rules,” Ashe said.
But the more impactful piece, he said, “is when we look at state programs to decide if they’re working as well as they should be — as well as the people deserve. And then, if not, what could be done to improve it.”
“We call them ‘performance audits.’ It’s a term most people will have never heard of and don’t really have to hear again,” Ashe added.
For example, the office recently audited the way the state’s dams were being maintained.
“When it came to the dams, there had been a lot of ‘out-of-sight, out-of- mind,’” Ashe said. “Even the ones the state owned were in terrible condition, languishing for years and years.”
As a result of the audit, “they’ve actually sought and received more money to staff up a little higher. And they’ve set in motion rule-making processes to be more safe. But there’s a lot of room for improvement even there,” he said.
It isn’t about playing “gotcha,” Ashe said. It is about designing systems and then utilizing them.
“The state of Vermont, in all the branches of government, has come up with systems to try to make sure that we don’t get way out over our skis financially,” he said. “When we decide how much money we should borrow, for instance, we have a process. We don’t just throw a dart at the board and pick a number because it’s really high and it allows us to spend more money. Vermont has set up these systems and been really faithful to them.”
Over time, Ashe said, “those lessons have become embedded into the way state agencies are operating.”
“It doesn’t mean that it’s a perfect score every time, but in general we don’t see large numbers of embezzlement cases,” he continued. “We’re not seeing, generally speaking, massive financial misstatements that look really bad.”
Vermont fiscal policies for expenses like education and healthcare fall outside the purview of the auditor. These policies are decided by the governor and the Legislature. But the auditor’s office monitors how the money is spent.
Once the auditor issues a report, do agencies typically respond positively? Do they make changes or ignore the reports?
“We can’t compel people to make the changes,” Ashe said. “So the heart of the job is identifying things.”
He believes the office generally has had “a good track record.”
“Most agencies, when we come to audit them, we call and say, ‘Hey, we’re here to audit you.’ They’re not happy about it. It pulls them away from the core work they do,” Ashe said. “But very quickly, most agencies realize that we’re not out to get them, so to speak.”
Running for the top job
If Ashe wins this election, he plans to continue the office’s success rate but also try to push it a bit further.
He wants more agencies to “understand that it’s in everyone’s interest to be collaborative,” he said. “They should view it as a positive thing and a chance to have a success story.”
In his five years as deputy, “I’ve been really determined that whenever agencies are proactive and make the improvements that we’ve identified, we’re the first ones to say, ‘Good job,’” Ashe said.
“It goes a long way to tell people that they should be commended for acknowledging that things weren’t perfect and that they’ve made the improvements,” he added.
Even with its limited resources, Vermont needs to be doing better, Ashe said.
“When I say that state government can better serve people, I would just lay out the basic things that I feel that most people feel,” he said.
“Healthcare prices are too high, and yet the response in some cases is to do things which seem counter-indicated, like closing a birthing center or making it harder to be a primary care office,” Ashe continued.
“Property taxes? A 40% increase in five years at a time when we have what seems to be progressively less education product to show for it? That is a problem. But it’s a political problem,” Ashe said. “It’s no one person to blame, but we’re not doing good enough.”
Efforts around the environment and clean water? Not good enough, he said.
“How that plays out in the auditor’s role is not just to say, ‘Oh, I have a hunch we’re not doing the best job we could,’” Ashe said. “It’s to say, ‘OK, we have a clean drinking water program. It gives out millions of dollars every year. We’re going to go out and see that they were picking the highest impact projects, and that when they were done, we actually saw the benefits.”
While Windham County sees some benefits from the state’s clean water funding, for example, the largest share of it is going to Lake Champlain and a few of the other larger bodies of water, Ashe pointed out.
“It’s tens of millions of dollars a year, and I don’t know that it’s clear that we’re really in a better spot today than we were six years ago when we started pouring in huge amounts of money,” Ashe said.
“So those are the kinds of areas where it’s not about this governor or the previous governor,” he noted. “It’s really about what are people getting for the money they send to the state.”
Ashe said that if he is elected state auditor, he is thinking about categories of spending to examine.
“For me, it’s healthcare,” he said. “How much the state itself is spending for different services, what the state could do to try to bring those prices down, access in healthcare, wait times for things like primary care, specialty care, mental health care.”
Housing is another issue.
“I have become particularly intrigued by the wide array of housing programs the state has,” he said. “Combined, the state is now spending substantial millions of dollars. I think that the auditor’s office can come in and do a good job of saying which ones are actually producing the most number of habitable units at a reasonable price.”
One objective: “How do we make sure that those projects are giving the most enduring public benefit?” Ashe said.
His strategy: “I think being the first to inventory these programs and see which ones are getting good value, and then seeing which ones have this long-term benefit for Vermonters that won’t evaporate after we hand over money to the person who builds it.”
Ashe said he is especially interested in small towns. Programs designed to work in Burlington or Montpelier look different in towns like Brattleboro.
“From the point of view of the auditor’s office, when you’re evaluating how state government is doing in any area that state government takes on, it will not look the same in Windham County as it does in Caledonia County or anywhere else,” Ashe said.
“These programs often have a one-size-fits-all feel to them because it’s hard to come up with unique rules for every single part of the state,” he added. “But we should do a better job of making sure that state programs are benefiting people with equity, that resources are actually flowing to all the communities and not being disproportionately flowing to one or two or three counties.”
Ashe said he recently had a particularly eye-opening conversation in Brattleboro about housing.
“I will not divulge the people I was talking to, but they were really concerned with the way the state approach to homelessness was playing out here in Brattleboro,” Ashe said.
“Without getting into the quite heated debate about what we should be doing to address this problem, what’s clear is that communities with large numbers of motels had a different challenge than communities that didn’t, and it wasn’t always clear that the state understood how different it is for Brattleboro or Manchester or Bennington than it is for communities that don’t have any motels at all and thus have a very different flavor of homelessness,” he continued.
Ashe said these concerns were a prelude to saying that, as state auditor, “What people can take to the bank is that you’ll see me periodically, right here. You’ll see me in every corner of the state, making sure that I’m talking to local officials, people who are on the ground, actually experiencing the state’s efforts.”
After a “a reality check,” he said, he would “know what I can go back and maybe refocus on. Because, in Montpelier, it’s a very different world.”
“Especially with faith in government at all levels at a really low point, I think the auditor’s office can play this really interesting role,” Ashe said.
“It can try to rehabilitate people’s confidence that state government can do things correctly,” he said. “And it can also be honest when we’ve fallen short.”
So, the candidate said, “I think there’s just a lot of opportunity to marry my skills with kind of a vision for the office.”
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.