State auditor’s bookkeeping criticized by DFL endorsee

08/16/2006

Rebecca Otto continues her election-campaign attacks, citing slipups by GOP State Auditor Patricia Anderson.

Conrad Defiebre, Star Tribune
Last update: August 15, 2006 – 10:35 PM

State Auditor Patricia Anderson’s chief election rival said Tuesday that Anderson’s recent official report on special local government district finances contains more than $201 million in numerical errors plus an unseemly tinge of partisan politics.

Rebecca Otto, the DFL-endorsed candidate for state auditor, said the slipups are nothing new for the first-term Republican. In April, Anderson’s office acknowledged an error in calculating changes in Minnesota counties’ fund balances that was pointed out by Otto.

On Tuesday, Anderson denied that the latest report had any accounting errors. “There was a typo in the narrative only,” she said. “All the data in the report was correct.”

In recent months, Otto also discovered $12 million in missing school revenue for the Department of Education and criticized Anderson after laptop computers containing personal identity information were stolen from the auditor’s office.

“It’s the pattern of not addressing these problems or taking responsibility that concerns me,” Otto said in a news release. “It’s not prudent management. Under my leadership, we’ll make sure the numbers will actually add up.”

Otto also said that she has found no errors in reports issued by previous state auditors Arne Carlson, a Republican; Mark Dayton, a DFLer, and Judi Dutcher, who was elected auditor as a Republican but now is the DFL running mate of gubernatorial candidate Mike Hatch.

But Anderson’s report on revenues and spending of 520 special-purpose Minnesota districts such as housing and redevelopment authorities, airport commissions, transit authorities and rural hospital districts is rife with “literally dozens” of errors, Otto said.

They include reporting $180 million less in non-operating revenue from public enterprises such as hospitals and electric utilities than the total of $569 million Otto got by adding up line items, and a near-$20 million variance between revenue totals in the auditor’s narrative report and those in the data tables, a difference Anderson attributed to late-arriving figures from local officials.

Anderson, meanwhile, disputed Otto’s allegation that the report had overstated the share of all Minnesota special-district operating losses run up by the Metropolitan Council’s bus transit operations. Anderson said the latest report was calculated the same way state auditors have done it for years. “She’s wrong on the Met Council,” she said of Otto.

Otto said that Met Council bus losses were actually 36 percent of all special-district losses statewide instead of the 46 percent reported by the auditor. Otto suggested that the higher figure might have been a sop to the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, a critic of transit initiatives whose antitax pledge Anderson has signed.