 Hello, and welcome to Channel 17's town-meeting television and another candidate forum for the general election. I'm Matt Kelly, your host for tonight's interview and conversation with candidates for auditor of accounts. We have Democrat Doug Hoffer joining us, as well as Liberty Union candidate Marina Brown. Richard Kenyon, Republican, was unable to join us this evening. He is running. His name will be on the ballot. Time for opening statements and Marina will begin with you, please. Hi, I'm Marina Brown. I'm running for auditor. My focus in running for the office of auditor is transparency. The job of the auditor, as Doug will probably explain, involves very auditing various aspects of the state. My interest is in transparency. I believe that the state has a long way to go in order to be properly transparent. We've made a lot of strides in the last two years, but there's still over 250 exemptions in the public records law. The office of the auditor is not normally used in the service of transparency. However, I would like to add an additional audit that would audit the transparency of the state. I would use the office of the auditor to expose data to the public. There's a lot of things that are exempt from public records. Types of software is exempt from the public's view. Database structures, these should not be exempt. The public should know what type of software is being used because their privacy is at risk if software is compromised. Database structure, likewise, should not be kept private because the public needs to know what is being kept about them and from them. I also want to promote the use of open source software in the state. Open source software makes the entire world the auditor of the software. Software-like accounts need to be audited for safety, and that's what I would like to do if should I be chosen as the auditor. Very good. Marina Brown, thank you so much. Doug Hoffer, your opening statement, please. Thank you. First, a correction. I'm running as a Democrat and a progressive. That's all right. Not a big deal. Been on the job six years. I'm still enjoying it. I have a great staff. The work we do, I think, achieves three important goals. It provides important information to managers to help them do a better job. Second, it provides information to policymakers so they can make better informed decisions. Finally, it provides information to the general public, which, as Marina noted, doesn't always have easy access to information about how state government works. I might add with regard to all those exemptions to the Public Records Act, I'm responsible for one of them. After I came in, I was contacted by a number of state employees who said they would be more inclined to provide information about what's happening in their departments if they weren't fearful of retaliation. At that time, if anybody contacted my office and said, give me the names of all the people, the whistleblowers who contacted you, I would have had to give it to them. I got the legislature to agree to let me protect the names of those who prefer to be anonymous. That's another one I threw in there. Sorry. Okay. We're moving right on. We have a complete list of questions. The candidates have been provided these questions ahead of time. A reminder, if you do have a question for Doug and Marina, you're invited to dial us up at 862-3966 and a welcome to all our viewers enjoying our online stream at ch17.tv. Doug will go right on to you if we may. Looking for a Vermont report card, how is the state doing in terms of its job meeting the needs of its citizens? In your viewpoint, how would you say that? That's a big question. Just as the financial side, then there's the provision of services. Our office is trying to answer both of those. On the financial side, for what it's worth, and this might surprise some people, we're doing reasonably well. We do have a balanced budget every year. That's a matter of cooperation between the administration and the legislature. The CAFR, the so-called CAFR, the audit of the state's financial statements is clean. We are a AAA rated state. Generally we do okay. There are people who disagree with how the money is spent or how much is collected but on balance we do all right. As for performance, that's where we come in. I come from a policy background and I was hoping in the office we could do more programmatic performance audits, which is basically what we do. I should tell people if they don't know, we don't do the compliance audit that the federal government requires. It's called the A-133 or the financial audit. We farm those out to an audit firm. That leaves us free to do performance auditing, which is a lot more fun. The only reason I would consider keeping or getting the job in the first place. The performance audits are both of the nuts and bolts of state government and ideally of programs. You are a program director and the legislature created a program and said here's some money, here are our objectives and goals. My job then is to say have you achieved those objectives and goals as stated by the legislature. That's often very difficult because the data is hard to get. Looking ahead I'd like to do more programmatic audits but on the financial side we do pretty well. Marina, a report card from your viewpoint outside looking in. How is the state doing financially and meeting the needs of its citizens in its programs? Well, I have not had time to look at financial data like Doug has but I look at more the problems. The problems I see are overpriced software that should have been perhaps done with open source software that would have been less expensive. I see a great deal of trouble in the prison systems. If I were elected auditor I would be grinding the prison system down. As far as exemptions for employees I don't believe that people who deal with the public in a position of power should have exemptions on their employment data. This means prison guards, this means if I'm elected I don't believe my information should be kept private. Maybe where I live the stuff where I could be targeted. I don't believe police officers job stuff should remain private. They are servants of the public. These are problems I see. I see people in power able to hide behind these exemptions. I will agree with Doug that whistleblowers should always be protected. To do that I advocate the use of software like secure leaks or global leaks. Secure leaks and it allows people to anonymously whistleblow without fear of somebody dropping their IP address. There are times when technological things should be used in the service of privacy and there are times when social methods are used in the defense of privacy. It should be privacy for the individual and transparency for the government and that includes government employees. Doug, Marina has raised some issues regarding transparency and some specific issues regarding software that we use, the databases that we use. Can you in your role speak to that and address some of the issues that she's brought up in terms of the privacy concerns, the transparency and that fine line that has to be drawn between the two here? Well I appreciate the interest but my focus would be more on the state's, I wouldn't say failure but lack of success in rolling out major IT programs over the last ten or fifteen years. What you describe as part of that but they've made a number of decisions in the judiciary and tax and DMV in some other places, big systems, multi-million dollar systems and of course for Mount Health Connect that were not managed terribly well. Maybe some choices were made that could have been improved if they had had additional assistance from professionals but we're headed in that direction. I think the desire and the intent of consolidating all of that into one agency which is called ADS, now the Agency of Digital Services, was well intended. I don't know that they planned that properly, there's a lot more work to be done and they need to be audited because they're a new entity and all should be monitored but the tax department for example is on I think their third IT system in twenty years. We are about to initiate or considering initiating audit at DMV which is now working with a new IT system which doesn't talk to some of the other systems. The big elephant in the room is that the Agency of Human Services which has a system called ACCESS which is about thirty years old and it's very important, it's a problem in fact it's part of the reason that the VHC, the Health Connect didn't work very well because everybody thought oh this is a chance to do both Obamacare here in the state and upgrade from ACCESS to something and integrate them and they overreached. They got too close to the sun on that one which is too bad but I'm sympathetic to those issues about what types of software but I'm more interested in the state getting its act together on IT broadly. We're gonna move on here and Doug, EB-5 certainly was in the news, we had TJ Donovan here in an earlier program animate that he is forwarding something along the lines of 2.5 million documents to the auditor of accounts or something or the Secretary of State. Do you feel that the state and the auditor of accounts is doing everything it can to get to the bottom of this and make sure that this type of fraud can never happen again? Well I'll answer the question after we've completed the audit. We've begun. They have been shipping us information regularly now for a month or two. It's immense, there's a lot of it. There's another tronche or two coming in in the next week or so. I'd rather not say much about it until we look at all the material. Can you not tell me now where you think the breakdown was? I can tell you in general what people already know and I know this from my own experience because I came here as I mentioned before we came on air. I came to City Hall in the 80s to work in CEDO and CEDO, the Community and Economic Development Office, was created effectively out of the rib of planning and zoning because they knew that you couldn't do advocacy and regulatory work at the same time. That's a conflict. Here the state decided to have its own EB-5 office which was understandable. They wanted to promote development in the Northeast Kingdom and in other parts of the state but they didn't see that there would ultimately be that conflict. You can't be an advocate and regulator at the same time. That was a problem and I think it left them unprepared to respond as they might have if they were purely regulators as opposed to promoters. Beyond that, there's nothing more to say. Marina Brown, do you feel comfortable that the auditor of accounts and the other entities in state government are doing everything they can to be transparent about what went on, what went wrong and that this will not happen again? I think they're suitably cautious about announcing results before the studies have done. It's a lot of data to look through. I don't think anyone could say everything in a judicious manner about what happened until a lot of research had been done. What I see is a hole in the ground in Newport when I go by. I think a lot of people believed what seemed to me like a scam from the beginning. We're going to build this great thing in the middle of Newport with the EB-5 investment. If the thing sounds too good to be true, it probably is. That's what it sounded like to me when it started. I wish some leveler heads had prevailed in saying no to that. We'll continue on here. The auditor's office recently investigated the state's prescription drug benefit programs. Do you know about those findings? I do not. Doug, we'll bring this to you. Can you speak about those findings and what they have done? We did engage an outside crew of people. This is immensely complicated. This whole subject, the pharmacy benefit managers. There's only a few of them left in the country that are substantial. They're Fortune 100 companies. That's how big they are. I think each year now it's up to about 25 or 30 million dollars just for state employees. This is not for Medicaid, which is even bigger probably. We were interested in whether the Department of Human Resources for its part was properly monitoring and overseeing the work of the so-called PBM. In part because we had seen reports by vendors they had hired to look into this for them. They claimed that ESI, Express Scripts, now I think they've merged with somebody else, owed the state millions of dollars. No serious effort had been made to collect that money. In part, I think it's because the contract, if you would see it, your eyes would glaze over. It's immensely complicated. The whole arrangement is challenging because it's based on the PBM having a relationship with manufacturers and not telling you what they're actually paying for the drugs they're selling or providing through pharmacies. Now they have their own pharmacies online. It's challenging. Furthermore, the legislature for reasons I'm not sure about allowed the PBM to decide what parts of that contract could be considered proprietary. One of them is the so-called spread, which is basically their profit. They have to report it to the Department of Financial Regulation and to DHR, but they can't even give it to the legislature. Now we saw that information as part of the audit. I can't disclose it, but it's a lot of money. Anyway, the DHR Human Resources just went through an RFP process. I think they're near signing a contract with the new guys. We'll see how it goes. I think they are going to take the findings of this report very seriously and make some improvements. It's an indictment about our prescription drug policies here in the state, not to mention just the country in general. It's not, yeah, it's the country. Medicine should not be a for-profit venture the way it is in the United States. And drug prices should be transparent. There should be no non-disclosure things. I believe if a drug company does not fulfill its duty in helping the people, rather than making profits, we should consider nationalizing it for the good of the people. On a related subject real quick, several years ago, a fellow working in my office and I became interested in the fact that if you go to the doctor and say, well, I think I need these procedures or it's recommended by your physician, they can't tell you how much it's going to cost. In no other part of your life do you commit to spending perhaps thousands and thousands of dollars without knowing what it might cost. So price transparency in healthcare is required in statute, but they haven't gotten around to it. So we did some work and we asked the legislature in the Green Mountain Care Board to focus a little more attention on this. We made some progress now. The two major insurers on their websites provide some information about what procedures cost at different hospitals around the state, but a lot more needs to be done. Doug, as auditor of accounts, again, your job is to ensure that government funds are used for the purposes intended by law. Recently, the state treasurer found some one time monies to help for the cleanup with the state's waterways. Is that a problem with efficiency that those monies are actually there? I mean, shouldn't Vermonters be expecting that our government is operating at its utmost efficiency as possible so that that money, in a sense, isn't there? I'm sorry, you're breaking up. No, of course. Of course we should. But to be clear, I'm pretty sure that what the treasurer, Beth Pierce, did in consultation with some other people is identify some options. One of them for the short term, actually, was to use capital funds. That's what it was. It wasn't laying around. What they did in effect is say, for the next couple of years, I think it was two starting last year, they agreed as they considered longer term solutions to tap into the capital funds. Now what that does, that money's already there. The legislature authorizes a certain amount of borrowing each year for prisons, roads, bridges, and so forth. I think they decided to divert some of that money to the lake. I'm not sure they had a plan as exactly to how to use it yet, but it wasn't unless I'm mistaken technically laying around. Do you think that's the accurate and the appropriate uses of those dollars? Well, the lake deserves all the attention we can give it, whether it should be capital funds as opposed to another source of funding I'll leave for the legislature and the governor, but that should not be a long term solution. No, that money is intended for capital projects. And while the lake is everyone's concern, capital monies are not intended initially for that purpose. Capital funds for cleanup of the lake, what's the long term solution? And obviously, it's not coming out of the auditor of accounts office, but the auditor obviously has some role in defining that the monies be used effectively. Yes, I mean, as far as cleanup, I'm for funding them more with progressive taxes and not not hitting the poor people, hitting the corporations and the most wealthy in the in this state for cleanup, rather than going from capital funds, it would be better for income. And to be clear, if you move $25 million a year from the capital budget to work on the lake, then there's $25 million of capital work that's not going to be done. Correct. And next year, whatever was planned for, whether it's a courthouse or a road, it's going to be more expensive. Well, at this time, we're going to ask for closing statements. We have a little bit of time. So Marina will begin with you. This is an opportunity to sum up your candidacy, why you're running and what you see the challenges of the state are in your candidacy can perhaps solve. Well, my candidacy again is about transparency. I see a number of problems within the state, the prisons, the police and public records. I've done a number of public records requests that I've had been asked for thousands of dollars to see the training from from one police department. I appealed it ended up being $2.89. But they tried to to charge me $3,000 for a bunch of spreadsheets. There needs to be a lot of attention on the prison system. I think there is no level of scrutiny that should not be focused on centurion. I think that some very bad things have been done there. I've helped people in prisons who are not getting health care and there's a lot of money being poured into the prisons and people aren't getting health care. If you want somebody who will look at the hard spots in Vermont, that's me and I would use the office of auditor as a bully pulpit rather than what exactly everything it's supposed to be. I would be exposing as much data as I could and I would start to create a portal as has been done, but I would expand that more to any public records would be put on a portal and the portal does not have to be very expensive. I'm a former data professional and I understand that you can create a data portal that puts just plain text data or PDFs for a few thousand a year or less. That's if you wanted to see somebody who would dig into problems and expose them more of a adversarial manner than Doug has done, then I'm your person. Okay, very good. Marina Brown, thank you. Doug Hoffer, your closing statements. Well, first let me say I'm very sympathetic and in fact we're working on something that I think you would appreciate in the office. In the course of our work we often do risk assessments before we initiate an audit. So we need to learn something about the program that's under consideration. Sometimes you can find a lot of information on a department's website, sometimes not. So my assistant is working very hard to collect all that information. We're going to present it to the various departments and agencies and say these guys have all their performance data, all their contracts, everything you could want is there. These guys almost nothing. What's what's the problem? Again, so I appreciate that and share your concern for transparency. As I said at the outset, I enjoy the job. I think we're adding value. There's a lot more work to be done and I look for people to support me. Very good. My thanks to Marina Brown and to Doug Hoffer for joining us here this evening and a reminder that Richard Kenyon while he was not here at the table this evening, his name is on the ballot and you can vote for him up into and including Tuesday, November 6th Election Day. For a complete calendar of upcoming candidate forums, please visit our website at ch17.tv and do join us Tuesday, November 6th at 7 p.m. for complete election results here at town meeting television. For all of us at Channel 17, I'm Matt Kelly. Thank you for watching. Good night.