Impeach Auditor Troy Kelley, don’t punish his staff

Agreements routinely get tied up in partisan knots in the waning weeks of the state Legislature, as illustrated last week when House and Senate leaders unspooled their budget blueprints for next year.

The Democrat-controlled House wants pay raises for teachers; the Republican-led Senate does not. The Senate plans to redirect money to save charter schools; the House doesn’t. The House would tap the rainy-day fund to fight wildfires and help the homeless; the Senate wouldn’t.

The string of issues to untwist has more snags than a fishing line in a tsunami, and it grows more tangled when Gov. Jay Inslee’s proposed budget is thrown in.

But there’s one point on which lawmakers from all corners of the Capitol have joined hands: their repudiation of Auditor Troy Kelley and, by extension, the work of his office.

In what amounts to a collective middle-finger gesture, the House, Senate and governor’s budget writers plan to loot $10 million from the auditor’s performance-audit account. When combined with the $12.6 million raided from it last year, the account would lose 74 percent of its two-year value.

Kelley, who faces a federal trial next month on money laundering, tax evasion and other charges involving his former real-estate business, has refused to resign. In Olympia, politically speaking, he’s a dead man walking.

Elected officials can’t be blamed for turning against Kelley, a former Democratic representative from Tacoma, especially after he abdicated his auditor duties during a seven-month leave.

But the rest of it feels like a cheap game of misdirected payback. Inslee and legislators can easily balance the state budget without taking the $10 million. For them to clean out this account would erode the independence of an institution whose 400-plus employees are doing important watchdog work in the form of more than 2,200 government agency audits each year. It also would defy the will of state voters who approved the performance-audit mandate in the first place.

The unsparing desire to defeat Kelley calls to mind a quote by French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “The injustice of defeat lies in the fact that its most innocent victims are made to look like heartless accomplices.”

The lead attack dog last week was state Sen. Mark Miloscia, R-Federal Way, who ran for auditor in 2012 and is running again this year. He called the proposed de-funding “the inevitable conclusion of Troy Kelley staying in office and allowing his agency to become a laughingstock.”

Here are a few recent performance audits for which this “laughingstock” should be given respect:

▪  A review of state computers sent for surplus or sale found 9 percent of them contained confidential data.

▪ An analysis of the Washington State Patrol criminal history database found 33 percent of records used for background checks were incomplete or missing.

▪ Several audits underway or pending that were mandated by – guess who? – state legislators.

▪ Two audits due this spring that scrutinize two agencies lawmakers have declared need intense scrutiny: the Corrections and Transportation departments. One investigation targets the DOC’s prison safety program. The other evaluates WSDOT’s toll collections.

The audit fund has the peculiar misfortune of being associated with two individuals who are persona non grata in Olympia: Tim Eyman – the initiative maestro who put performance audits on the ballot in 2005 – and now Kelley. Small wonder lawmakers have never treated it as sacred.

Former Auditor Brian Sonntag saw the fund plundered from time to time. It gradually would be replenished by the 0.16-percent sliver of the state sales tax earmarked by Eyman’s Initiative 900, which means the audits eventually could resume at full pace – until the next raiding party arrived.

Sometimes Sonntag was able to enlist allies, like in 2009 when Gov. Chris Gregoire vetoed a money grab. But right now the auditor’s office has few defenders.

For the last year, it has largely been run by Deputy Auditor Jan Jutte, a 30-year agency veteran. She has sent letters to elected leaders, imploring them not to use her nominal boss’s personal legal troubles as reason to underfund the office.

Her plea might fall on deaf ears. Legislators this year are sending a strong signal that the auditing bureaucracy must improve in areas such as customer service. A bill that would weaken and partly privatize the office’s oversight of local governments overwhelmingly passed the House this month. Jutte and her staff would do well to let the message sink in.

Likewise, lawmakers would do well not to sweep up others in their contempt for Troy Kelley. If they want to be rid of him, then impeach him, by all means. Otherwise, let these professionals continue the jobs they’re trained for, doing the accountability work voters have told them to do.

This story was originally published February 27, 2016 at 4:31 AM with the headline "Impeach Auditor Troy Kelley, don’t punish his staff."