THE STATE’S HIGHEST COURT helped clear a few of the logs that were jamming the way forward for Diana DiZoglio’s audit of the Legislature, but the toxic political fight that has consumed Beacon Hill is far from over.
Roughly a year and a half after DiZoglio first moved to follow through on new power voters granted her, the state auditor is inching closer to getting an answer on whether she can in fact examine certain aspects of the House and Senate without breaching constitutional firewalls.
Those bigger legal questions had been idling while justices sorted through a related but separate dispute between DiZoglio and Attorney General Andrea Campbell over how litigation could unfold. A day after hearing arguments in that matter, the Supreme Judicial Court gave Campbell a hard deadline to decide whether to represent the auditor in her lawsuit seeking to force the Legislature’s cooperation with her review. Campbell had been hesitant to take up DiZoglio’s case, arguing that the auditor was failing to answer key prerequisite questions about the scope of her planned audit.
Campbell responded by permitting DiZoglio to go forward with litigation against legislative leaders, represented not by the AG but instead by outside counsel—Shannon Liss-Riordan, a high-profile lawyer who lost to Campbell in the 2022 Democratic primary for attorney general.
DiZoglio told CommonWealth Beacon that Liss-Riordan will take on the case pro bono. Despite the forward movement, she continued to jab at Campbell over the AG’s prior resistance.
“It was very important to [Liss-Riordan] that we be able to have representation,” DiZoglio said. “She very much saw the games the attorney general is playing, and Shannon Liss-Riordan is no stranger to standing up to the attorney general and standing up to Beacon Hill.”
Campbell also signaled she would appoint a special assistant attorney general to represent legislative parties in the updated case, rather than have her office directly handle that responsibility.
The next steps could arrive in the coming weeks.
DiZoglio will dismiss her initial lawsuit against legislative leaders over their sustained audit opposition and file a new complaint, specifically limited to a quartet of topics she targeted in a January 2025 letter to lawmakers: official legislative budgets, financial audits conducted of the House and Senate, information about their “balance forward” line items used to carry funds to another year, and monetary settlements between the branches and current or former employees.
That’s a narrow list, especially compared to the often lofty expectations many voters and legislative critics have when they gripe about a lack of progress on “the audit.” Much of the financial information is already publicly available, and it’s not clear exactly how much new information DiZoglio’s review would be able to uncover on the budgeting front.
While the scope of her January 2025 request was limited, DiZoglio has publicly discussed an interest in scrutinizing other aspects of the House and Senate, where she previously served and was regularly a thorn in the side of legislative leadership. Audit critics for months have pointed to those remarks and argued that DiZoglio was overreaching, while Campbell repeatedly claimed the auditor was failing to provide her office with the sort of detailed information on the audit needed to greenlight litigation.
Campbell said the SJC’s order “forced some clarity and specifics that we had been seeking.” Senate President Karen Spilka similarly said it was “a good day for the Legislature to finally hear what the auditor is exactly looking for,” according to State House News Service.
Today, the auditor insists that she is not winnowing the scope of her investigation, just agreeing to have the lawsuit at hand focus only on the four types of records she initially requested. She expects to “go back and ask for additional records” as her work unfolds.
Given the zealous opposition House and Senate Democrats have mounted to DiZoglio’s earlier attempts, it seems unlikely they will be eager to comply with future requests for documents, interviews, or other information outside the scope of what will be contested in court. If that’s the case, even an SJC ruling on the forthcoming lawsuit might not be the end of the dispute, which has spilled over into the current election cycle, with DiZoglio also campaigning for a ballot question that would subject the Legislature to the state’s public records law.
“This particular audit is about these particular issues of finances and state contracting, but a future audit would potentially look at other things,” DiZoglio said. “But we’re going to take that case by case.”
