Legislative Audit office briefs appropriations subcommittee on performance-audit process

Will Solar, deputy legislative auditor for the performance audit function, told Subcommittee F of the Legislature’s Finance and Claims Committee that the audit division is the legislature’s transparency and accountability function and can examine whether state program funds are expended as intended.

Solar said appropriators can forward topics or risks they identify to the audit committee for consideration. “If you as a committee and as appropriators identified concerns, risks that you were seeing, that there was an opportunity to again forward that to the audit committee,” Solar said. He described the division’s role as embedding in state agencies to assess program performance and to identify opportunities for improvement.

Solar outlined how the audit committee prioritizes work: in June the performance audit team generally collects a list of candidate topics, the committee votes and ranks them, and that ranking forms the audit team’s workload. He said the audit division has three distinct audit functions — financial audits, performance audits and IT audits — and offered to brief the committee on the IT audit approach so members can better understand the division’s methods.

A committee member asked for an explanation of the IT audit approach to reduce the sense of IT as a “black box.” Solar said the IT group uses a risk‑oriented, structured process and offered to walk members through how it works.

Solar also directed members to a memo from Legislative Auditor Angus McKeever that was distributed to the committee; he said the memo describes a prior recommendation to create a mechanism for appropriators to forward concerns to the audit committee and includes guidance on topics and risk framing for performance‑based budgeting.

The briefing concluded with Solar offering to answer further questions about performance and IT audits and the committee moving on to other agenda items.