IF YOU KNEW ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about Beacon Hill, you might have found state Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s appearance at a Wednesday legislative hearing to be a routine, even banal check-in between a constitutional officer and the lawmakers who hold the state’s purse strings. And if you know at least a little bit about the years of feuds and furor between the two parties, you might have expected more fireworks.

DiZoglio and her deputies ventured before the Legislature’s Ways and Means Committee just one day after she escalated her campaign to probe the House and Senate, an effort that earned overwhelming support from voters in 2024 but has since stalled in the face of opposition from legislative leaders and skepticism from Attorney General Andrea Campbell.

In the nearly 50 minutes she spent in the hot seat this week, though, neither DiZoglio nor the lawmakers in the cavernous hearing room made a single mention of the acrimony between them. Lawmakers have repeatedly slammed DiZoglio’s attempt to probe their work as an overreach, arguing that any investigation would be colored by her prior tenure in both the House and Senate. Plus, they say, the Legislature already undergoes financial auditing by outside firms.

The auditor — who opened with a greeting for “my esteemed colleagues in the Legislature” — and her staff instead touted their work investigating public benefit fraud, described the statutory limits around their examination of childcare facilities, and warned about risks posed by AI in government work.

Once DiZoglio’s team finished their presentation, lawmakers had only a few questions about the work of the auditor’s office, none of which referenced her contentious effort to audit the Legislature.

But the far-from-cold war between DiZoglio’s office and the Legislature was on her mind. Half an hour before the budget hearing kicked off, DiZoglio struck a defiant tone.

“People are very frustrated with the fact that our lawmakers are breaking the law and getting away with it, and I think that that frustration is showing,” she said in an interview on The Horse Race podcast. (The Horse Race is produced by MassINC Polling Group, which is a part of CommonWealth Beacon’s parent organization, MassINC.)

This is giving some candidates for office purchase to make the audit attempt a campaign issue, like Republican candidate for US Senate John Deaton, who announced his own lawsuit attempting to enforce the audit ballot measure one day before DiZoglio’s appeal to the high court.

As to whether she worried that her lawsuit would make it harder to secure funding from the Legislature, DiZoglio called the budget hearing awaiting her “another day up on Beacon Hill.

“I mean, these folks have not liked me for as long as I can remember,” she said. “They’ve been trying to retaliate for years and years now. I don’t expect this year to go any differently.”

DiZoglio said her office doesn’t get, in her estimation, the cost of living adjustment it needs. The Legislature in 2025 approved a budget including $26.15 million for the auditor’s office, a roughly 3 percent increase over the $25.4 million appropriated a year earlier.

DiZoglio believes the funding approach is “an attempt to make the office of the state auditor so anemic that when we do conduct our audits, we’re not able to conduct the robust audits that we would like to conduct, and we’re only able to audit agencies about lighter topics, and not dig as deep, and not pull the thread on issues that we really want to pull the thread on, which allows for accountability to go by the wayside, and transparency to go by the wayside.”

Nearly 72 percent of voters enacted a law via ballot question in 2024 making explicit the state auditor’s ability to audit the Legislature, but continued opposition from Beacon Hill has stalled any such investigation.

Last year, the attempted audit bubbled up and boiled over into the annual budget hearing.

This time around, the two lawmakers who led the hearing, Ways and Means Committee chairs Rep. Aaron Michlewitz of Boston and Sen. Michael Rodrigues of Westport, told reporters they intentionally aimed for a polite exchange with DiZoglio.

“We’re playing courteous to everyone that appears before the committee. That’s just how we treat everyone that comes before us,” Rodrigues said. “This is about the budget, right, and the needs that every constitutional officer has to perform the duties that they’re responsible for. It’s not about other contexts, so we stuck to the issue.”

Many lawmakers on the 53-member panel left the basement State House hearing room during the brief period between the prior speaker, Treasurer Deborah Goldberg, and DiZoglio’s arrival.

But Michlewitz said there was no intentional walkout — many representatives headed upstairs, he said, because they had to cast roll-call votes in a House session that was taking place concurrently.

Sen. Cindy Friedman of Arlington, who chairs a Senate panel that was tasked with responding to the audit-the-Legislature law, said lawmakers have tried unsuccessfully to better understand what information DiZoglio wants to acquire.

“My colleagues and I each swore an oath to uphold the Commonwealth’s Constitution when we took office. We have an obligation to honor those principles, including the separation of powers laid out in that document,” she said. “At a time when constitutional norms are being challenged nationally, we cannot allow them to be undermined here in Massachusetts.”

During a back-and-forth with Republican Sen. Kelly Dooner of Taunton about public benefit fraud, DiZoglio made a point to demarcate the limits of her own power.

In some cases, she said, auditors can conduct a post-audit review to monitor how an agency or entity responded to the findings. But even then, DiZoglio said, her office lacks enforcement authority.

“They might say that they didn’t do anything and they disagree with our office and they’re not going to do anything,” she said. “They are legally within their right to do so.”