Chris Leyba on Changing the Culture of the State Auditor's Office

We interviewed Chris Leyba, the Republican candidate for State Auditor, about his professional experience, his view of the State Auditor's role, and what he'd like to do if elected in November.

Note: This interview has been abridged in some places for clarity.

LD-37: Why did you decide to run for State Auditor? What got you interested in the political world?

Leyba: So, the political world side of it is less important to me than the government oversight aspect of it. This particular office is unique because it really shouldn’t be political. In my interest and my experience as an auditor, you really are looking for objective facts, and whether they’re good or bad, your whole goal is to find out if a process is improving, getting worse, or staying the same, and what measures need to be taken to address it if it’s getting worse or staying the same and it can be better.

My interest in this office specifically is that it is a very underutilized tool for government oversight that can fix a lot of the damaged processes we have in the government in this state.

Okay, let’s expand on that a little. What exactly is the State Auditor’s job? What is the purpose of the office, and what do you intend to do within that office if elected?

Leyba: So, I look at it as three main functions. Number one is keeping financial oversight of the state. So the original mission of the State Auditor back in 1889 was to track how the state is using money, how state government agencies are using your money… whether they’re staying within budget, whether they’re appropriating their money properly… and if they’re not, whether there were explanations for that.

The second function that we actually got in 2005 with the approval of Initiative 900 is performance auditing, and that is actually going in and figuring out not only what they’re doing with the money, but if the processes in that agency are using your money in the most efficient way possible, and if they’re not, what can be done to fix those processes to make them better.

The third aspect is government oversight and accountability, and that comes down to whistleblower protection and misconduct investigations. Now the State Auditor predominately does misappropriation of funds or fraud investigations in terms of whistleblowers, but it is a very important function, because it needs to be a timely response to complaints, whether major or minor, because there is financial fraud or financial misconduct happening.

One of the big problems that I personally have with the current incumbent is that I don’t believe that the office has been run very well since Brian Sontag left it. He was a five-term State Auditor who I think left office in 2013. One of the big things I want to improve is the balance of what we’re looking at.

There is a lot of imbalance in what is actually looked at inside of the office versus not, and the problem is there are certain critical agencies that are very high risk, like the Employment Security Department for example, that are going years and years and years without audits and then all of the sudden they are getting slammed for political reasons. We need much more balance and a much more regular schedule of high-risk agencies and high-risk audits because that is how you prevent things like what just happened with the unemployment security scam from happening.

The performance auditing is a smaller function of the agency because there are less funds available for it, and because of that, I plan on completely changing how that is being done, because the issues that they’re doing performance audits on inside of the agency right now are not very relevant to the majority of Washington citizens. The current auditor was the chair of the Sound Transit Regional Council. She’s one of the original brainchildren of S-T-3, and it took her all the way until the last year of her term to audit Sound Transit. And lo and behold, there were some huge cost overruns and misappropriation of funds and those sorts of things found.

We need to do a better job of balancing out what we’re looking at, and figuring out what exactly Washingtonians want done with that very limited amount of time, and what will actually benefit them and which agencies and processes we can look at that will benefit the most amount of people with that small fund.

You’ve spent time in the Seattle Police Department and the King County Sheriff’s Office. What did you learn in those places that you’d like to apply to the job of State Auditor?

Leyba: Well, the Seattle Police Department is where I did three years of performance auditing, so that is where I was trained in performance auditing, and I was certified by the International Law Enforcement Auditors Association.

If we’re talking about an overall, global lesson from working with for the Seattle Police Department, it’s culture. I believe that as the State Auditor, I’m going to go in and I’m going to change the culture of how our auditors are perceived around the state. What I mean by that is that as I’ve gone around the state, there seems to be an issue where… whether they’re not personable, or flat out not-very-friendly… our audit staff is not very well-received by state agencies.

So, I plan on building in some sort of feedback process so that when we actually do annual performance reviews of my employees we can give them constructive feedback and even send them to training for various interpersonal skills and stuff like that. Because if we don’t improve that… an audit is already stressful enough… it’s just going to cause more issues for us while trying to get those audits done in an efficient fashion, if we cannot relate well with the people we need to go out and audit.

In the King County Sheriff’s Office –I’ve been there for about five years– I’ve been an investigative detective there for most of my time, as opposed to an inspections detective like I was in in Seattle. The big thing that I think I’m going to take away from the King County Sheriff’s Office as far as what I can bring to this agency is empowerment.

What I mean about that –you can actually look this up yourself— a lot of the anonymous job sites that talk about either current or former employees of the State Auditor’s office, will talk about how there’s not a lot of room for growth, and there’s not a lot of room to explore ideas outside of the box.

Now, to some extent that’s true. It is a very defined job. But I want my employees that have good ideas to know that they can run those ideas up the chain, and actually get answers and have a receptive State Auditor managing them. Because there might be employees in, let’s say, eastern Washington, that have identified very real problems and high-risk opportunities that we should be looking at, and if they don’t feel empowered to be able to go up the chain to me, those are never going to be addressed, which means I’m not doing my job.

Your platform emphasizes auditing various state government entities. If elected, and if you conducted those audits, what do you think you’ll find, and what will be the implications of those things, if discovered?

Leyba: So… it’s not a gotcha game. What do I think I’ll find? You know honestly, I don’t know. I mean, one of the first audits I’m going to order when I take office is a COVID-19 after-action report. And that is gonna be predominately three agencies: Department of Health, Emergency Management Division, and the Office of the Governor. The purpose is not necessarily to go in and find that they did anything right or wrong. What I want to do is put together for Washington citizens a comprehensive analysis of everything those agencies did to respond to COVID-19, and what went right and what went wrong.

The whole point of this is to provide a very neutral, objective platform for, God forbid, if COVID-20 comes out, or the next pandemic, we’ll know and we can actually learn from the processes that we carried out this time and do it better next time.

And I’m going to take the same approach with any audit. I don’t want to go in and necessarily find this ah-ha smoking gun to go after anybody. It’s about what went wrong with the process, what went right with the process, and how can we apply that moving forward to make sure we stay on an upward trend of performance.

Find out more about Chris Leyba at LeybaAudits.com

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