![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/OCBoardofSupervisors_May20_2025_Taylor-23.jpg\")
Supervisor Donald Wagner at the Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting on May 20, 2025. Credit: ERIKA TAYLOR, Voice of OC<\/p>\nOrange 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Mental Health Services Act.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While supervisors haven\u2019t approved a final contract yet, county internal auditor Aggie Alonso said he\u2019d be bringing a contract back for supervisors to approve in the near future.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Supervisor Don Wagner argued it would be an issue of \u201cdiminishing returns\u201d to finish reviewing all the spending after they looked at the highest risk contracts, saying they could decide to shorten the list.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it is very important that we look at the highest risk contracts,\u201d Wagner said at Tuesday\u2019s OC Supervisors meeting. \u201cBut once we get through that, we\u2019ve got obvious diminishing returns and a ton of money still being thrown at it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Supervisor Donald Wagner at the Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting on May 20, 2025. Credit: ERIKA TAYLOR, Voice of OC<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI also don\u2019t want to water down this effort cause it\u2019s taken a long time to get here,\u201d Sarmiento said. \u201cWere others involved? That is part of the objective here, at least from my end.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know if we find that in one phase,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt\u2019s going to take the complete audit.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/OCBoardofSupervisors_May20_2025_Taylor-34.jpg\")
Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento at the Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting on May 20, 2025. Credit: ERIKA TAYLOR, Voice of OC<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve found.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Under the proposal, auditors would sort the county\u2019s contracts into different sections based on the potential they were abused or mishandled and look at the highest risk contracts first.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter each phase, the selected firm is required to produce a public report,\u201d Alonso said. \u201cWe\u2019re doing active monitoring on a daily basis related to this. Once this starts, we\u2019ll certainly be monitoring the work.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s taken a long time for us to get here,\u201d Foley said. \u201cWe\u2019ve already reviewed a lot of these contracts \u2026 we may do this faster because of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nguyen, who replaced Do in last November\u2019s election after he resigned, said she wants the audit to give closure to residents and answers on what happened to their money.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t go into it and then say we can\u2019t be as thorough as you wanted us to,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cI want you to know that going into this, we\u2019re going to be watching it and we\u2019re going to be all over it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org. <\/p>\n
\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Orange County Supervisors unanimously picked an outside team of auditors to review billions of dollars in contracts nearly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6280,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,2084,6702,6703,6704,6705,4764,4765,4767,2267],"class_list":["post-6279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-andrew-do","tag-board-of-supervisors","tag-county-government","tag-don-wagner","tag-janet-nguyen","tag-katrina-foley","tag-orange-county-board-of-supervisors","tag-vicente-sarmiento","tag-voice-of-oc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}