Orange County Supervisors unanimously picked an outside team of auditors to review billions of dollars in contracts nearly a year after their former colleague Andrew Do pleaded guilty to accepting bribes and rerouting over $10 million worth of contracts. 

While Do serves five years in federal prison, supervisors are paying over $1.3 million to auditing firm Weaver & Tidwell, asking them to review over 2,000 contracts worth over $4 billion, including spending from the county general fund, pandemic relief funds and the state’s Mental Health Services Act. 

While supervisors haven’t approved a final contract yet, county internal auditor Aggie Alonso said he’d be bringing a contract back for supervisors to approve in the near future. 

It remains unclear how many of those contracts will ultimately end up being reviewed, with supervisors debating on Tuesday whether they would go through with reviewing every contract. 

Supervisor Don Wagner argued it would be an issue of “diminishing returns” to finish reviewing all the spending after they looked at the highest risk contracts, saying they could decide to shorten the list.

“I think it is very important that we look at the highest risk contracts,” Wagner said at Tuesday’s OC Supervisors meeting. “But once we get through that, we’ve got obvious diminishing returns and a ton of money still being thrown at it.”

Supervisor Donald Wagner at the Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting on May 20, 2025. Credit: ERIKA TAYLOR, Voice of OC

But Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento argued that every dollar should be reviewed, and that he wanted to prioritize looking for county staff that may have helped Do avoid detection.  

“I also don’t want to water down this effort cause it’s taken a long time to get here,” Sarmiento said. “Were others involved? That is part of the objective here, at least from my end.”

“I don’t know if we find that in one phase,” he continued. “It’s going to take the complete audit.”  

Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento at the Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting on May 20, 2025. Credit: ERIKA TAYLOR, Voice of OC

But one thing all supervisors agreed on was that whatever the auditors find should be made public, and required that auditors come back regularly to report publicly on what they’ve found. 

Under the proposal, auditors would sort the county’s contracts into different sections based on the potential they were abused or mishandled and look at the highest risk contracts first. 

“After each phase, the selected firm is required to produce a public report,” Alonso said. “We’re doing active monitoring on a daily basis related to this. Once this starts, we’ll certainly be monitoring the work.”

Weaver and Tidwell claimed they could review the highest risk contracts within just under 100 days, a deadline Supervisors Katrina Foley and Janet Nguyen asked them to stick to or finish early. 

“It’s taken a long time for us to get here,” Foley said. “We’ve already reviewed a lot of these contracts … we may do this faster because of that.”

Nguyen, who replaced Do in last November’s election after he resigned, said she wants the audit to give closure to residents and answers on what happened to their money. 

“Don’t go into it and then say we can’t be as thorough as you wanted us to,” Nguyen said. “I want you to know that going into this, we’re going to be watching it and we’re going to be all over it.”

Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.

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