As we begin the next fiscal year and the Local Government Auditing Quarterly begins anew, I'm very excited about the prospect of having thematic issues.

Our intent is to encourage more auditors to submit articles for publication in the LGAQ by publicizing a sort of writing prompt for every issue. The perennial complaint from most prospective authors is, "I just don't know what to write about..."

Every issue this fiscal year will have some theme around which the articles will revolve. For this issue, the theme is The Art and Science of Auditing. In light of recent tragedies in Minnesota and around the nation, the December 2007 edition will be Infrastructure Audits. Other proposed themes include:

• Discretionary Funding Audits
• Public Safety Audits
• Ethics in Auditing
• Auditing Technology and Technology Audits
• Local Governance's Relationship with Audit
• Auditing for Policy Change

Please submit your ideas for other themes to us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . We will publish a schedule for the rest of the year in the December edition. We hope to include your input in our decision.

To kick off this new style, Brandon Haynes and I have included several articles this issue that focus upon The Art and Science of Auditing. After all, our profession forces us to continuously delve into both sides of our brains in order to assess and evaluate problems. I considered partnering with Brandon to submit an article about designing a auditor dinner menu based upon a quantitative analysis of this month's abstracts but decided that may be carrying the theme a bit too far.

We hope you enjoy reading about projects, techniques, and lessons learned from other local government auditing shops as much as we did.

Doug Whitworth, LGAQ Editor

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