State auditor speaks on P.I.E, partisanship and public trust

Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand visited with a dozen Crestonians Wednesday morning as part of his annual 99-County tour – an effort to hear from Iowans across the state.

Marcia Fulton asked Sand to introduce himself.

Sand, 38, who has served as Iowa’s state auditor since defeating Mary Moseman in 2018, is originally from Decorah. He said he first became interested in public service because his parents were civically active.

“Not politically, but civically. Faith to me is also a big motivator,” he said.

Sand told town hall attendees of his first personal community project he worked on starting as a high school junior, which took two years – the installation of a skate park in his home town.

“Twenty years later it’s still there. My cousins got to grow up using it. Lots of kids got to grow having a place to do that,” he said. “It made me a believer that we can have an impact in our lives through working with, whether it’s local government or state government.”

Road to public office

Following his graduation from Decorah High School in 2001, he attended Brown University, where he graduated from in 2005. He attended law school at the University of Iowa, graduating in 2010. He said he was the first person to be editor-in-chief of a law journal and president of the student bar association.

After graduation, Sand served as assistant attorney general in the Iowa Attorney General’s office from 2010 to 2017.

“I was prosecuting mostly public corruption cases as well as some violent crime and some sexually violent predator civil commitment cases from the attorney general’s office.” he said. He led the investigation and was the prosecutor in the Iowa Film Office tax credit scandal and the Hot Lotto fraud scandal.

Sand said he left the attorney general’s office because the work he was doing there was changing him.

“I’ve always been kind of a happy and optimistic person,” he said. “Criminal work is not happy or optimistic. There is no criminal case that I’m aware of, where, when it was over, people said, ‘I’m glad this all happened.’ It’s just the worst things human beings can do to each other. To get up day after day and only think about the worst things people can do to each other isn’t fun. It’s not happy. It’s not optimistic.”

From AG’s to Auditor’s

Sand said he was interested in working in the state auditor’s office because it handles public corruption cases.

“I knew the people over there, the handful that I had worked with and I liked them,” he said. “They are passionate about what they did. They care about holding people accountable.”

Sand said the idea of making the auditor’s office more efficient is what excited him about running for the position of state auditor.

“They can help counties, cities, school districts be more efficient with how they are using tax payer dollars, but they weren’t doing it,” he said. “To me, it was like the clouds parted and I said, ‘I want to be state auditor.”

As state auditor, Sand said he’s most proud of the P.I.E. program – Public Innovations and Efficiencies his office created. It’s a framework to help state and local governments – such as school districts, cities, counties and federal organizations – increase efficiency and communicate with the public about their efforts.

“We named it that because we think it should be as popular as pie,” he said.

Sand said when it comes to P.I.E., he can wake up every day and think of ways to make government operate more efficiently.

“Then I’m not just going after the negative ... I’m actually creating something lasting that has a positive impact,” he said.

Sand said local leaders have thankless jobs, but they are the some of the most essential for self-governance.

“Fix the pot holes, make the sewer work, make the water come out of the tap, policing, fire department. Those kind of things. Our P.I.E. program, really at its heart, is helping them find ways to do more with what they have to be more efficient and effective.”

This year, Sand’s office performed an analysis this year of public solar energy installations and found the average public solar installation is saving that entity $750,000.

“Which is real money. Three quarter of a $1 million is great,’” he said. “You install two of them, you’re saving $1.5 million.”

The findings of the analyses are published online at auditor.iowa.gov for the public to see how its local entities are performing and to inspire other entities to follow suit. Sand said the largest participating city was Cedar Rapids and the smallest was Beaconsfield in Ringgold County. In Union County, the recorder’s office, board of supervisors participated in the P.I.E. program. Municipalities within the county that also participated are Afton, Cromwell and Lorimor.

For the best performing entities, Sand delivers actual pie to celebrate the accomplishment. But his favorite part of the program, which he dubbed the “third piece of pie,” is the “recipes” his office collects.

“Not pie you eat, but P.I.E. ways to save money,” he said. “The idea behind it is simple. Everybody in this world has the intelligence to come up with a good idea that’s going to save money. You might be the guy that drives the street sweeper through Creston and you know more about street sweeping than I do. And if you come up with something that you can do with those street sweepers that we se in most towns and it saves money in how they operate, we would love to hear about it and share it with the rest of the state.”

Over 350 participants from Iowa’s 99 counties voluntarily took part in the program.

Public entities can learn more about the Public Innovations & Efficiency program at auditor.iowa.gov/pie/pie-online.

Team work and partisanship

Dorothy McNaught asked Sand about his qualifications for his position as auditor.

“I did an honor’s thesis while I was in college, which was actually awarded best honors thesis. It was a statistical analysis with a spreadsheet with about 30,000, or maybe it was 40,000, data points in it. So I’m very comfortable with the numbers side.”

Sand said he’s not trained as an accountant, but he has “oodles and oodles” of certified public accountants in his office.

“They do a great job and we are a great team,” he said. “An auditor’s office that is only CPAs and accountants is like having a football team with 11 quarterbacks playing an offensive at the same time.”

He said he wants different people with different talents working together.

“I think it’s been effective,” he said.

Within his office, Sand promoted two people who contributed to his opponent in 2018 to senior leadership positions. He said actions matter. You can either punish people for their differences, or reward them based on merit and send the message of “That’s enough.”

Sand, formerly a independent, was forced to choose a political party when running for the position of state auditor. It’s a requirement in Iowa he disagrees with.

“I don’t like political parties,” he said. “I am a registered Democrat (now). It’s more of a pick your poison thing than it is a pleasure.”

Sand said everyone should think independent of party lines.

“George Washington, John Adams, everyone of the founding fathers told us to watch out for partisanship,” Sand said. “I swear we are living in their nightmare right now.”

Sand said partisanship is “childish.”

“It doesn’t mean we don’t have disagreements. It’s not like if we got rid of parties we’d be singing Kumbayah and have some utopia,” Sand said. “Half of the country yells at the president for golfing. When a president from their own party gets elected and goes golfing, they shut their trap. Either you care that the president is golfing, or you do not. So much of this that we do, that we put our time and energy in to is doing nothing for any of us. This is supposed to be about problem solving.”

Sand said during his time in the AG’s office, he prosecuted Republicans and Democrats.

“I didn’t really care (about political affiliation). Here in this office, we’ve criticized the governor when she’s deserved it. I have also defended the governor when she’s deserved it,” he said.

Sand said he and those who work in his office are about putting the public first and doing the right thing.

“I want the most talented people around me even if they think different from me politically,” he said. “Otherwise we get in to group think. You can’t spot your own blind spots. If everyone thinks the same as you then there’s blind spots none of you are thinking about.”

Waking the watch dog

Sand said people generally in comfortable positions in life had access and the ability to commit their crimes because they were in positions of trust.

“Frankly, we often go too easy on people like that when the reality is, I think, we should hold them to a higher standard because they’ve been given so much,” he said. “So this job to me ... is making people understand they are regular people, too, no matter what their position is in life, no matter how high they climb. The rules are for them, not just for you and me. That’s really important to me.”

Public audits, special interest reports, and resources for local governments and public entities are available at auditor.iowa.gov.