As California’s budget approaches $350 billion, tracking the spending is proving a monumental task. It’s been 20 years since the state attempted to truly update its financial information system, known as FI$Cal. We now live in a completely different technological world.
It falls to the California State Controller to be the state’s official accountant and disburser of funds. This moment calls for a financial professional and not a career politician to handle the complex task of modernizing our financial systems. The only person on the ballot capable of doing so is Herb Morgan.
Morgan has been a heavyweight on Wall Street, serving as chief investment officer for Cantor Fitzgerald Investment Advisors. But with roots in California dating back to 1967, he also helped the city of San Diego two decades ago to crawl out of a pension scandal that was downright criminal, cleaning up the mess afterward on the city’s retirement system board.
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Morgan faces incumbent Malia Cohen, who took office in 2022 and seeks a second term. Cohen is a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and Board of Equalization. We thought Cohen was the second-best candidate in 2022, and we endorsed her opponent, Republican Lanhee Chen.
Cohen happens to be a Democrat; Morgan, a Republican. Democrats have held all constitutional offices in California for 15 years. Too many voters simply look at the party affiliation of the candidate and pick accordingly.
This is not serving California well. The state is facing some exceedingly complex challenges, whether it is the management of state finances or the meltdown of the insurance industry. Partisanship has little to do with these positions. The expertise on any given ballot can come from any party affiliation, including none at all.
Frankly, Cohen is relying on her party affiliation rather than the achievements of her first term to try to stay in office. She refused repeated requests to participate in an endorsement interview with Morgan. And after quizzing him, we can see why.
Morgan has in mind something so ambitious that only a seasoned expert would dare to contemplate. He wants to automate government so that all its transactions are fed daily into a giant database. The Controller’s Office could then monitor suspicious spending, right down to a government credit card being charged at Gucci. And so could you.
Morgan calls this idea “Radical Transparency,” but it is really not all that radical. A version of this is already being developed in Ohio, known as Ohio Checkbook.
Migrating to a system of real-time reporting of government transactions offers clear advantages. Artificial intelligence can review essentially limitless transactions and flag those worthy of attention. Transparency in spending can increase trust in government. The ability to detect possible fraud on a daily basis would also serve as a powerful deterrent.
Morgan makes this sound easy, but any initiative like this would require pilot projects before any large-scale conversion. But the Controller is the office to make this happen, where limited audits are conducted and official budgets are tabulated. It also has the authority to determine how it receives financial information. The speed of the internet and the AI revolution is downright scary, but some of this potential could be used to protect taxpayer dollars and improve our government.
Ideas like this are rarely going to come from those who are in one elected office after another, year after year. They come from the outside.
Morgan’s public service in San Diego was truly that, a busy businessman taking some time to help a city out of a mess. He’s ready to serve. And California would be fortunate to bring the Controller’s office into the modern era. A vote for Herb Morgan is a vote to make you, hopefully some day, a powerful watchdog of all state spending.