THE LAST-MINUTE scramble to clear a legislative logjam, which top lawmakers intermittently shrug off as a normal part of Bay State governance, looks to state Auditor Diana DiZoglio like the predictable outcome of a “toxic” culture of top-down governance and operational secrecy. 

As the final day of the legislative session dawned, lawmakers stared down a grueling to-do list. More than 24 hours later, a handful of major bills, including the economic development package,  had withered on the vine. This was distressing enough to the governor that she made an unusually sharp request of the Legislature to continue to work until a final agreement could be reached.

The end-of-session display highlights some essential characteristics of the Massachusetts Legislature’s processes that DiZoglio – a former lawmaker herself – has been trying to examine through an audit. After hitting significant resistance from leadership, she’s championing a ballot measure that will be Question 1 before voters in November to explicitly give her the authority to conduct the audit.

“We don’t need an audit to know that leadership controls pretty much everything in the House of Representatives and the state Senate,” DiZoglio said Wednesday during a segment of The Horse Race podcast, cohosted by the MassINC Polling Group and CommonWealth Beacon. “That is on display for everybody to see.”  

DiZoglio’s origin story kicked off as Beacon Hill staffer in her 20s, weathering a vicious round of gossip leveled against her in 2011 based on ultimately unfounded rumors of impropriety. The next year she would unseat her local state representative – publicly breaking a nondisclosure agreement related to the 2011 incident – and hold the post until winning a state senate seat in 2018. She tangled with House and Senate leadership throughout her tenure.

“Especially while I was a state senator and a state representative,” she said, “oftentimes I would face tremendous pushback if I tried to get access to read legislation that we were being asked to vote on.” DiZoglio said her efforts to get bills at least 24 hours before votes were rebuffed. 

An audit wouldn’t give her access to backroom conversations or fundamentally overhaul the leadership system, she acknowledges. 

“There is a toxic culture of all control being with a handful of people in the state Legislature that is contributing to the things like you just saw at the end of the legislative session,” she said. “That is something that an audit would not be able to necessarily impact. That is a culture shift that needs to be changed from within, and with pressure from the general public.”

In an initial letter announcing her intention to audit the Legislature, DiZoglio said she was interested in assessing budgetary, hiring, spending, and procurement information; information regarding active and pending legislation; the process for appointing committees; the adoption and suspension of House and Senate rules; and the policies and procedures of both chambers.

The audit could “look at processes and procedures, where we are able to measure outcomes, making sure that the House and Senate are following their own documented rules,” she said. 

When the auditor’s office examines other state entities, DiZoglio said, it checks whether or not those entities follow their own policies, their own mission statements, and their own public statements about their direction. An audit of the Legislature would be able to highlight “some of the breakdowns in how they are conducting business,” she said.

“We know that it’s all power and control residing with a handful of people that’s allowing for it to get to the last minute and just kind of be held behind closed doors,” she said. “But when we look at the rules and when we look at how these bills are actually going through the system, are there processes and are there procedures that can be examined in comparison with other states?” DiZoglio suggested her office could do a comparative analysis with states that  “have seen more success than Massachusetts in more productive legislative sessions, and getting things done in a more timely fashion, and in a more accessible and in a more transparent fashion.”

Legislative leadership argues that such an audit would run afoul of separation of power protections, that they are empowered to craft their own rules, and that they already make financial statements available through the state comptroller’s office.

Legislators are correct, DiZoglio said, that they get to set their own rules, but she says there are few checks on compliance. She highlighted other auditing work to make sure that groups are providing essential cybersecurity training to their employees, or conducting sexual harassment training in a timely fashion.

“These are gaps in the system that we can help to identify,” she said. “We can raise that to legislators. We can let them know about where these challenges exist for the purposes of improving the system and helping the Legislature to work better for those it’s meant to serve. And we do have support from some legislators on this, thankfully, and a lot of staff. It’s just, unfortunately, the folks that happen to be the most powerful in the institution who continue to oppose these efforts.”

If the ballot measure passes and survives likely legal challenge to begin in earnest, DiZoglio wouldn’t be surprised to see “heel dragging” similar to other audited government entities. There are often “significant challenges” in getting requested documents within two, four, even six months, DiZoglio said, which her office has been “cracking down on.” The auditor’s recourse is asking the attorney general’s office to take the entity to court.

The money trail is part of the equation, with recent focus from the Boston Globe on campaign coffer spending and legislative leadership stipends doled out as essential parts of the power concentration equation. In other audits, DiZoglio said, her office will pull receipts and check them against the claimed financial statements to reconcile claimed spending with actual spending.

“We can’t do that right now with the state Legislature,” DiZoglio said. “We can’t confirm that what they say they’re spending money on, that they actually are spending money on.” When they’re contracting out for services,” she said, the office should be “looking at those contracts and making sure that they were done legally and ethically and all above board.”