{"id":11321,"date":"2014-07-22T21:41:50","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T02:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=11321"},"modified":"2014-07-22T21:46:51","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T02:46:51","slug":"the-state-odditor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=11321","title":{"rendered":"The Minnesota State Odditor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I woke my wife up in St. Louis this morning at 2:30 a.m. to get into our car in drive for ten and a half hours straight to get to Duluth and the State Auditor&#8217;s presentation. I unpacked the car and printed out a dozen pieces of paper related to the Red Plan the District&#8217;s finances and messages sent back and forth between the Auditor and Loren Martell who got the ball rolling. I hustled over to the Board room groggy from my long drive but twenty minutes before the presentation. I was handed the exhaustive 8 page report which concludes with a sentence that begins, &#8220;We were not engaged to, and did not perform an audit&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>No kidding. To every question Art Johnston and I asked the three, <em>count em three<\/em>, auditors did their impression of the great Hogan&#8217;s Heroe character Sergeant Schultz,&#8221;I know nothing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The only information they reviewed came from the folks we wanted audited. They declined to offer any opinions even when asked such safe questions as <em>would the State Auditor frown on double dipping by vendors bilking local government?<\/em> I asked that question although not perhaps as succinctly.<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=11161\">my email<\/a> to her staff member Mark Kerr I mentioned that my grandfather had been a state auditor until Kansas abolished the office years after his retirement probably for being redundant. I think it might be time for Minnesota to consider doing the same thing. After what I heard tonight I am sure all of the embezzlers in Minnesota&#8217;s local governments can rest easy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I woke my wife up in St. Louis this morning at 2:30 a.m. to get into our car in drive for ten and a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,35,91,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11321"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11321"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11329,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11321\/revisions\/11329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}