Lately I’ve been finding more and more newspaper coverage of our audit work here in Austin, Texas. Sometimes that’s good, and sometimes that’s bad, but it’s always more interesting than having our work go completely unnoticed. If the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, we can at least claim that we are not unloved by our local newspaper.

Similarly, we may think that if citizens are so keenly interested in our work, then other audit shops must be as well. We may assume that auditors around the country are doing the same kinds of projects and using the same sort of methodologies that we are using. We may conclude that issues in local governance are the same across the country, but after reading through your abstracts for the past year, nothing could be farther from the truth— we are a diverse nation with diverse problems and equally diverse audit topics.

Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill is credited with coining the phrase, “All politics is local.” I think that very necessary addendum to that phrase is that, “All audits are local.” We should share the news about our audits with one another to gain a better understanding of our issues by providing a context in which those reports are issued. Both the Local Government Auditing Quarterly and the website are outstanding methods for publicizing our work and educating the public about what we do.

We have been getting more and more audit abstracts submitted for publication through the website and by email attachments and I’m consistently impressed by the quality of the articles that are submitted to the Local Government Auditing Quarterly. This month’s article by Elizabeth Moore was particularly noteworthy and will serve as a great introduction to some of the topics that will be presented at the 2007 ALGA Conference in Memphis.

We are looking forward to continuing the tradition of excellence established by the Association of Local Government Auditors at this year’s conference. Hopefully, you all will find the conference to be useful and inspire one another to write articles of your own!

Average user rating